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On April 7th, 2008 it was announced that CMS Faculty member Junot Díaz had won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In addition to the Pulitzer, the novel was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007, was selected as Best Novel of 2007 by Time Magazine, and has appeared on many other Best of 2007 lists.
The novel tells the story of Oscar, a Dominican-American boy from Jersey who wears “his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber” – not unlike many MIT students – and aspires to become a science fiction writer. The novel also shares the story of Oscar’s family history as it was influenced by the reign of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the dictator who led the Dominican Republic for more than thirty years.
Oscar Wao was a novel eleven years in the making. Upon its release in September 2007, it garnered rave reviews from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times and such publications as Newsweek, The LA Times, Star Tribune and Esquire. In his review, Kakutani called the novel “extraordinarily vibrant” and that Díaz has “written a book that decisively established him as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices.”
Such praise is not altogether unfamiliar to Díaz, who in 1996 published Drown, a collection of short stories. While the collection did not attain equal levels of acclaim as Oscar Wao, it did help establish him as a rising star in the literary world. Robert Spillman of Salon called him “the next young gun of American fiction” and novelist Walter Mosley said his work “explodes off the page into the canon of our literature and our hearts.”
Díaz is an associate professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. He has previously taught the course 21W.755 Writing and Reading Short Stories, a favorite among students and one of the “great and unexpected” treasures of the MIT undergraduate experience.
The 2007-2008 recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, Díaz currently lives in Rome where he is working on his second novel, Tokyo Rose.
For more on Díaz, please visit http://www.junotdiaz.com/. For more on his Pulitzer Prize win, please see http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2008/junot-d%C3%AD%C2%ADaz-wins-pulitzer-oscar-wao.
