Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Ben H. Winters is the New York Times bestselling author of The Quiet Boy, Underground Airlines, Golden State, and the Last Policeman trilogy. His books have won the Edgar Award, the Philip K. Dick award, the Sidewise Award, and France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. Ben also writes for television, and lives in Los Angeles with his family.
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Ben H. Winters is white, and the narrator of his new novel, Underground Airlines, is not. In fact, the narrator, Victor, is African-American, an ex-slave in a contemporary version of the United States with a speculative-fiction twist: the Civil War never happened, meaning that slavery is still legal (in portions of the country, anyway). Victor is a bounty hunter tasked with finding runaway slaves, which puts him in an understandably awkward (if that understatement will do here) position: he uses his race to ingratiate himself into the lives of other African-Americans whom he will eventually betray. This leads the character—and the novel—toward much soul-searching about what it means to be black in America. And once again, Ben H. Winters is white.
How do you feel about this basic fact of Underground Airlines? I ask, in part, because this issue arose in a conversation I recently had with a white bookseller who felt uncomfortable recommending the book in a store newsletter because of the author's—and the bookseller's own—race. This is a version of an old question that haunts writers: how do you gain the authority to tell the story you're telling? And, in this particular case: can a white author ...
Novelist, screenwriter, columnist and short story writer Michael Chabon was born May 24, 1963 in Washington, DC. He grew up in the suburbs of Columbia, Maryland with his parents Robert, a physician, lawyer, ... (more)
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For first degree, Claire Fuller studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art. She began writing fiction at the age of 40, after many years working as a co-director of a marketing agency, she received a Masters degree (... (more)
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