Who wrote The Nickel Boys, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?

Colson Whitehead wrote The Nickel Boys, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The novel follows Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager sent to a brutal reform school in Florida during the civil-rights era. Its fictional Nickel Academy is inspired by the real Dozier School for Boys, where generations of students suffered abuse and neglect.

The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Whitehead had already won the same prize for The Underground Railroad in 2017, making him the fourth writer to win the Fiction Pulitzer twice and the first to win in consecutive years. The novel’s restrained style contrasts with the violence it depicts.

Readers sometimes confuse the fictional school with a real institution. Nickel Academy is invented, while the Dozier School for Boys provided the historical basis. The book is also distinct from Whitehead’s earlier Pulitzer winner, which uses speculative elements to portray enslaved people escaping through an imagined railroad network.