Colson Whitehead wins Pulitzer prize for The Underground Railroad

Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.

Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers.