Festival writer Colson Whitehead recently received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for The Nickel Boys, the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Whitehead previously won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his sixth novel, The Underground Railroad. Whitehead is only the fourth writer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice.

The Nickel Boys: A Novel

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation’s best” (Entertainment Weekly). 

Colson Whitehead has established himself as one of the most versatile and innovative writers in contemporary literature. From the secret lives of elevators to international poker tournaments, Whitehead takes on the marginal, the strange, and the surreal. His award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, is a magnificent tour de force that chronicles a young slave’s journey during a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. This powerful novel has been described as a shattering meditation on the United States’ complicated political and racial history.