Finding The Inside Track

Colson Whitehead explains how New York, post-traumatic stress and a long gestation helped shape his latest award-winning novel. Mei Jia reports.

Colson Whitehead, this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, who is on his first book tour in China, says he finds Beijing's roads too broad to make walking around enjoyable, but Shanghai, like New York where he grew up, is an incredible place to walk around.

"I love cities. They're fascinating," he tells China Daily at the hotel where he is staying in Beijing, a few hours before he joins poet Xi Chuan for a talk on the theme of cities.