Event Detail

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Amerika Haus e.V. NRW, Buchhandlung Klaus Bittner, and the U.S Consulate General Düsseldorf cordially invite you to a Reading and discussion of the novel »The Underground Railroad« by Colson Whitehead moderated by Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke with German passages read by Marion Mainka.

 

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 in New York City and raised in Manhattan. Today, he lives in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Harvard University, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. As a freelance journalist, he works for several newspapers and magazines. Colson Whitehead's reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta. In 2015 he was a guest lecturer for Creative Writing at Princeton University.

The Underground Railroad, a novel, was published in the summer of 2016. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times Bestseller. More recently, Whitehead has won the 2017 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Fiction Award. The novel documents the life of a 15-year-old slave girl named Cora who escapes from a cotton plantation in Georgia, where life is miserable. With a slave catcher hunting her, she makes a harrowing flight north in search of freedom, traveling on a literal underground railroad made up of secret tracks, tunnels, engineers, and conductors.

The evening will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke, Director of the North American Studies Program at University of Bonn. German passages will be read out by actress, moderator, and speaker Marion Mainka.

Copies of The Underground Railroad will be available for sale, and Colson Whitehead will be happy to sign them after the reading.

The event will be held in English and in German.

 

Tickets are sold exclusively through Buchhandlung Bittner for 8 Euros (6 Euros reduced fee):

E-mail: bittner.buch@netcologne.de

Telephone:      0221 – 25 74 870

 

Ort: Aula der Königin-Luise-Schule | Alte Wallgasse 10 | 50672 Köln

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