Colson Whitehead’s ‘Crook Manifesto’ Wins $50,000 Gotham Prize

NEW YORK (AP) – Colson Whitehead’s latest literary honor feels right at home.

The creator’s “Crook Manifesto,” a criminal offense novel set in Nineteen Seventies Harlem and centering on a beleaguered furniture store owner, is that this yr’s winner of the Gotham Book Prize for outstanding work about New York. The $50,000 prize was established 4 years ago by bookstore owner and philanthropist Bradley Tusk and political strategist Howard Wolfson.

“Crook’s manifesto is a portrait of a man, but also of his city,” Whitehead, a native New Yorker, said in a press release Wednesday. “Capturing the dynamics of my hometown and its crazy inhabitants is at the heart of the project, so I can’t express how great it is for the book to be recognized with the Gotham Book Award.”

In a joint statement, Tusk and Wolfson praised Whitehead’s novel as one they hoped to have a good time, one which showed “the city in all its complexity.”

Previous Gotham Prize winners include Andrea Elliott’s nonfiction “Invisible Child” and James McBride’s novel “Deacon King Kong.”

Whitehead is one in every of the country’s most famous authors, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote such works as “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys.” He titled “Crook Manifesto,” the second a part of a planned Harlem trilogy that can begin in 2021, “Harlem Shuffle.”