Colson Whitehead: “In New York you never know what's going to happen to the cop you run into. I've felt that way since I was a teenager."

In 2022, at the age of 52, Colson Whitehead decided that it was a good time to get his driver's license: ”And I got it.

Let's see, in New York I've never needed it.

But I began to feel guilty, because it is my wife who always has to take the children, go shopping... During the pandemic I decided that, when it was over, I should try new things and getting my license was one of them.

But I drive like an old lady, ”she says, pretending that she takes a very strong steering wheel with both hands and puts her head close to an imaginary windshield.

It turns out funny.

Whitehead is over six feet tall and the complete opposite of an older lady.

Of course, she doesn't fit the image of a double Pulitzer winner either, and she is.

He got it in 2017 with

and in 2020 with

“The first time I was in a good mood for a whole year.

The second happened during the pandemic and I was on other things, ”he says.

The Underground Railroad

was the title that established him.

He already had six novels and two non-fiction books and had achieved that strange bingo of being respected by critics and selling reasonably well.

Enough to live a comfortable life.

But this was something else.

He not only won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

He was praised by Barack Obama himself and, above all, he was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, a machine for creating

“Sometimes I get the impression that the topics my books deal with may sound stupid.

I wrote a book about elevator inspectors, who would want to read that?” He says, referring to

(1999), his first novel.

“When Oprah selected

It attracted a lot of people to my book who would normally see it in a bookstore and say, 'This seems stupid.'

It was a very strong drive the first two weeks.

Then he kept growing and growing on his own.”

The novel has sold more than a million copies, but it was not an easy birth: it took her 14 years to decide to write it.

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Its origin was in a childish confusion.

it was the name of an organization that during the 19th century helped escaped slaves from the South to reach the northern states or Canada.

As a child, the imaginative Colson, a kid who locked himself in his room reading Marvel comics — “I loved them, I think I decided to be a writer thinking: 'Wouldn't it be cool to write Spider-Man comics? metaphor was real.

That a train line with convoys, train drivers and stations ran underground.

As an adult, having become a writer who admired the magical realism of García Márquez and Borges, he considered turning it into a book.

But the task of writing a novel about slavery overwhelmed him.

“I was thinking about it for 14 years.

Every time he finished a book, he thought, 'Am I ready to write it?'

And the answer was always no.

Until I realized that I had avoided it for a long time but still the idea did not go away.

That moment seemed the right time to write it.”

Colson Whitehead, pictured in Madrid. Edy Pérez

He won the Pulitzer again for his next novel,

a terrifyingly realistic account of a Florida reform school where abuses were committed for decades.

All of Whitehead's work revolves around the feeling of defenselessness before authority for being black in the United States, but in this case the discomfort is almost physical: “I am always attentive to what is happening around me.

For me, and I'm not the only one, any moment could be the one that changes my life forever.

said it :

Leaving home five minutes earlier or five minutes later can change your life.

And yes, I feel like in New York you never know what's going to happen to the cop you run into.

If this is the moment in which your life changes.

I'm over 50 and I've felt that way since I was a teenager.

It's not for anything specific.

I am only aware of what is around me.

Whitehead has just published in Spanish (Random House) and Catalan (Periscopi)

his last work.

He has come to Spain to promote this crime novel starring a furniture salesman who becomes a fence at night.

His store is on 125th Street, the same as the Apollo Theater and the already closed Hotel Theresa, the heart of what has been the black neighborhood of Manhattan since the 1940s.

Set in 1965, little remains of that neighborhood today.

“The original immigrants who lived in Harlem came from Italy, Germany and Ireland.

There were also Jews.

They lived in the brownstone townhouses that real-estate speculators built.

In the 1920s, black immigrants from the South arrived.

Ironically, the young people who are moving there now are the great-grandchildren of the first immigrants.

They left Harlem and went to the suburbs and their descendants are coming because New York is cheap.

It is safer now than 50 years ago.

There was a heroin epidemic, another crack.

But the last 20 years it's been going up."

After two books as hard as the previous ones, this one, the beginning of a trilogy with the same protagonist whose second part will take place in the seventies and the third in the eighties, had a much lighter birth.

“This book has a much humbler origin.

One day my wife was driving and I was thinking about what movie to see that night.

It occurred to me that

which would be the millionth time we've seen it.

And I thought it must be a lot of fun to do something like that, basically.

I was envious of Steven Soderbergh and asked myself: 'Could I write a heist novel?'

And so I gave myself permission."

Would you like Soderbergh to make the film?

"You must be very busy," he jokes.

For now

it is the only one of his works that has gone to the screen.

It is a great Amazon Prime miniseries directed by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of

“I don't put faces to my characters.

So their faces are always somewhat blurred.

My last trip before covid was to visit the set and it was really miraculous to see the cast: they were my characters.

Or seeing 100 people, this huge team working, in a scene using details that I wrote years before.

For example, I wrote that a wagon was red without giving importance to the detail.

It was random, but there was a wagon and it was red because that's in the book."

The writer is from a good family, his parents ran an executive recruitment company and he studied at Harvard.

“It was good, there I read many authors for the first time: James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett... but they were very classic.

There was only one class devoted to literature after 1945."

He started writing in the 1990s, at

"I was not a journalist," he qualifies.

“I did not go out and I am very bad at interviews, I ask stupid questions.

I was a television columnist, which was what nobody wanted back then.

The truth is that working with publishers and being forced to publish taught me a lot.”

In the end he got what he wanted: to be a writer.

Neither write articles, nor teach, work quietly from home.

“I'm not one of those who go to coffee shops.

At home I can take a nap or eat a sandwich.

Writing from ten to three seems fine to me.

My goal is eight pages a week.

That's 32 a month, which means that in 10 months I have a 300-page novel.

That's my rhythm."

Whitehead has pointed out Toni Morrison on many occasions as his great reference.

How do you see the state of black literature in the United States today?

“My first book,

, is about elevator inspectors, which is actually a weird metaphor for race.

Was it published in 1960?

No, you had to be more social realist.

Talk about issues facing the black community more directly.

Now there are many more black writers.

But the publishing world is still very white.

If you go to Random House's US offices there are very few black publishers, even now that the sales charts are a little more diverse than they were four years ago.

So is it a good time?

It is getting better.

Is there room for improvement?

Yes, a lot".

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