Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer
Posted April 8th, 2008by Lisa Pierce
Earlier this week, Junot Diaz became the second U.S. Latino to win a Pulitzer prize for fiction for his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel had already earned the 2007 National Books Critics Circle Award.
Diaz, 39, was born in the Dominican Republican, and arrived in the U.S. in 1974. He grew up in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University. Diaz has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and he is currently a creative writing professor at MIT.
While at Cornell, Diaz began work on his first collection of stories, Drown. Like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the stories from Drown focus on young contemporary protagonists simultaneously coming to terms with the family upheavals and cultural alienation often inherent in the contemporary immigration experience.
The last Latino novelist to earn the award was Oscar Hijuelos in 1989 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
This year another Latino, Michael Ramirez of Investment Business Daily, won a Pulitzer for cartooning, his second.
Read En mi opinion blog host Ilan Stavans’ review of Diaz’s novel for the February-March 2008 issue of Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros:
https://www.revistaprl.com/review.php?article=33&edition=1-3
And read more about Diaz’s reaction to winning the coveted writing prize at the Star-Ledger of Newark:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/pulitzer_winner_stays_true_to.html
