Behind the Book, Episode 123
Sixteen Years of Waiting: Colson Whitehead on Getting Good Enough
Nora Ellis in conversation with Colson Whitehead
Recorded July 29, 2026 · 03:07
https://behindthebookfm.com/episodes/the-underground-railroad

This interview is a voiced dramatisation written by our team, drawn from the
author's publicly documented remarks on craft.

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[00:00] Nora Ellis:
Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis. My guest today has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, which is a sentence very few writers get to hear: Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys, Harlem Shuffle, and the novel we are here to talk about, The Underground Railroad. Colson, welcome.

[00:19] Colson Whitehead:
Happy to be here. Thanks for reading the book instead of the jacket copy.

[00:26] Nora Ellis:
Give the listener the premise.

[00:30] Colson Whitehead:
A young woman named Cora escapes a Georgia plantation on an underground railroad that is, in this book, an actual railroad. Real trains, real tunnels. Every state she surfaces in is a different American experiment in what to do with Black people. It is a slave narrative built like a series of nightmares with a timetable.

[00:53] Nora Ellis:
You had that idea sixteen years before you wrote it.

[00:59] Colson Whitehead:
I did. I had it in two thousand, and I was too scared. It needed a writer who could handle the violence honestly, and I was not that person yet. Waiting was not laziness. Some books need you to become someone else first.

[01:14] Nora Ellis:
How do you research atrocity without drowning in it?

[01:20] Colson Whitehead:
Mornings only. Notes, not immersion. And then something extremely stupid on television at night. You owe the material accuracy, you do not owe it your health.

[01:32] Nora Ellis:
What did you want the book to achieve?

[01:35] Colson Whitehead:
I wanted the reader to feel the machinery of it. Not slavery as an atmosphere, as a system with paperwork and engineers. And I wanted Cora to be a person, not a symbol. If she is only a symbol, the reader gets to admire her instead of walking beside her.

[01:54] Nora Ellis:
You switch register constantly, horror to satire to crime. Why?

[01:59] Colson Whitehead:
Because I would be bored otherwise, and a bored writer makes a bored reader. Also, the jokes matter. Humour is how people actually survive heavy things, so a book without any is lying slightly.

[02:12] Nora Ellis:
How far do you want it to go?

[02:16] Colson Whitehead:
Into schools, mostly. Prizes are lovely and they last a week. A book on a syllabus gets a new set of sixteen year olds every September for twenty years. That is the reach I actually want, and I will do the podcasts and the posts to get it.

[02:31] Nora Ellis:
Last thing, for the writer with the file that will not open.

[02:36] Colson Whitehead:
Stop researching and start writing. The research is a very respectable way to hide.

[02:43] Nora Ellis:
Colson Whitehead, thank you. As with every guest, our work continues after the recording: The Underground Railroad is on our promoted books page this month and going out to our readers everywhere. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell one person about this episode. I'm Nora Ellis. Thank you for listening to Behind the Book.