Morehouse grad wins prize for debut novel

Whiting Award given to Tope Folarin for fiction.

Tope Folarin, the son of Nigerian immigrants and a 2004 graduate of Morehouse College, has won the Whiting Award for fiction.

Folarin is among 10 writers, poets and playwrights whose Whiting Awards were announced Wednesday evening. Each year the Whiting Awards are given to 10 emerging writers, each of whom also receives a $50,000 prize.

The award honors Folarin’s novel “A Particular Kind of Black Man,” published in 2019 by Simon & Schuster. The autobiographical tale, of a family of Nigerian immigrants growing up in Utah, was also chosen as one of NPR’S best books of 2019.

The Whiting judges described the novelist as “an engrossing storyteller, [who] crafts marvelous sentences that act as a clear pane of glass through which one glimpses an upside-down world.”

The New York Times called the book “wild, vulnerable and lived” and “(a) study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts.”

Reached at his home in Washington, D.C., here he lives with his wife Stephanie and their two children, Funmi and Femi, Folarin said “I’m happy the cat will be out of the bag.”

He was informed in February he would win the prize, but the judges requested that all winners keep their awards secret until Wednesday. “I’ve been sitting on the news for a while,” he said.

The award is one of the most prestigious honors in letters and Whiting winners frequently go on to win Pulitzers. Last year’s Pulitzer Prizes in literature were all won by Whiting honorees, including Atlantan Jericho Brown, who won the 2020 Pulitzer in poetry for “The Tradition.”

Like Tunde Akinola, the protagonist in his novel, Folarin grew up in in Utah and Texas.

His very disciplined father drove an ice cream truck and delivered packages for UPS, among other blue-collar jobs, but insisted on academic excellence from the Folarin children.

The father posted a note on the refrigerator every week listing the accomplishments he expected