Junot Díaz wins the Pulitzer Prize
The brilliant Junot Díaz, author of one of my favorite short-story collections of all-time Drown, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday for his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The novel, which also won the National Book Critics Award, revolves around "Oscar," a young and nerdy comics fan growing up in gritty Paterson, N.J. with his close-knit Dominican family. The text travels back and forth from the inner cities of New Jersey to the streets of the Dominican Republic under the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship.
Up until Monday, the only U.S. Latino writer to ever receive the Pulitzer Prize in literature was Oscar Hijuelos, for “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” published in 1989. Diaz is currently a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Congrats are in order.
This novel was amazing, as was Drown.I met him at a reading and he was also a very kind person. He really deserves this.
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Anonymous |
4/13/2008