The Wonderous Life of Junot Diaz

For any young person who's attempting to make art against all the odds, I hope this can be inspiration and motivation.

Junot Diaz, who describes himself as :

This Dominican kid from New Jersey ...

has won the 2008 Pulitzer fiction prize for literature with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which tells the story of a family of Dominican immigrants, both in the present in New Jersey and in the past in the Dominican Republic. (And which is already happily sitting on my bookshelf!)

The novel is described in the Guardian as :

... an unconventional tale ... funny, unapologetic and intensely readable ...

and took him 11 years to complete - four for the idea to germinate and seven more to actually get written :

In some ways I think that this book waited for me to become a better person before it wrote itself ...

he is quoted as saying in a report on the Pulitzers in the New York Times. He credits his fiancee and his agent for coaxing and cajoling him to get the book finished.

(You can find an extract here, and there's an interview with Diaz on Powell's website)

The runners-up for the fiction prize were Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (which, you may remember, won the National Book Award last year) and Shakespeare’s Kitchen by Lore Segal a collection of 13 interrelated stories about the universal longing for friendship.

And a much deserved special citation this year goes to Bob Dylan, as much poet as musician.

More about the awards on the Pulitzer website.

Vietnam War Story Wins National Book Award

The National Book Award for fiction has been won by Denis Johnson (left) for Tree of Smoke, a novel which, according to Motoko Rich in the New York Times:

... features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers

Johnson has previously published numerous novels, short stories, plays and poems, and won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for Train Dreams in 2002.

Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, won the non-fiction prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.

Weiner (right) has been writing on American intelligence to for twenty years, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on national security programmes. This book tells the history of the CIA and highlights its failures.

Here's the author talking about his book:


The prize for young people’s literature went to Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian:

... an autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who leaves his poverty-stricken reservation school and moves to a wealthy, all-white school.

while the poetry prize went to former poet laureate Robert Hass for Time and Materials: Poems 1997 to 2005.

Essayist and novelist Joan Didion was honoured with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.