On the next Great Conversations, Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, joins Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of BuzzFeed Books, to discuss his novel and its critical success.

Great Conversations “Colson Whitehead and Isaac Fitzgerald” airs Monday, Jan. 16 at 8/7 pm on KET and Sunday, Jan. 22 at 6/5 pm on KET2.

The Underground Railroad chronicles a young slave’s desperate bid for freedom and a heroine’s harrowing flight north, offering a powerful meditation on both history and the present day. In Whitehead’s rendering, the Underground Railroad is not merely metaphoric. A secret network of tracks runs beneath Southern soil, conveying the novel’s heroine, Cora, to different worlds at each stage of her journey – all while underscoring her desperation to escape the horrors of bondage.

New York City-based Colson is no stranger to acclaim. His earlier works, including Zone One, The Intuitionist, Apex Hides the Hurt, Sag Harbor and John Henry Days (2001) – a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize – have been lauded by readers and critics alike. Praising Whitehead early in his career, John Updike wrote, “Whitehead’s writing does what writing should do; it refreshes our sense of the world.”

The program was recorded at Whitehead and Fitzgerald’s recent appearance at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum.

Great Conversations: “Colson Whitehead and Isaac Fitzgerald” is a KET production. Producer-director is Tom Bickel, and executive producer is Teresa Day. Kentucky Author Forum is produced by Mary Moss Greenebaum and is sponsored by the University of Louisville, in partnership with Brown-Forman and The Humana Foundation.

 

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