Junot Díaz

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Junot Díaz 2007

Junot Díaz (born December 31, 1968 in Santo Domingo ) is an American - Dominican writer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for creative writing . Díaz's oeuvre focuses on the duality of immigrant experiences . For his novel The Brief Miraculous Life of Oscar Wao , he received the Pulitzer Prize , the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2008 . In 2015, this novel was chosen by the BBC's selection of the 20 best novels from 2000 to 2014 as the most important of this century to date. Many of his works are stylistically assigned to magical realism .

Life

Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a district of Santo Domingo ( Dominican Republic ). He was the third of five children to spend the first six years of his life with his mother and grandparents while his father Rafael Díaz worked in the United States. In December 1974, the family immigrated to Parlin ( New Jersey from), to join his father again. In New Jersey, the family lived less than a mile from what Díaz described as one of the largest in New Jersey.

In New Jersey, he attended Madison Park Elementary and became a voracious reader at an early age, often walking four miles to check out books from the local city library. Very early on, he developed a fascination for apocalyptic films and books, especially for the works of John Christopher , the British miniseries On the Edge of Darkness and the first film series Planet of the Apes (1968–1973), which are based on the original novel by Pierre Boulle oriented. In 1987 he graduated from high school.

He began his studies at Kean College in Union Township , New Jersey, but moved after a year to Rutgers University , where his major was English . Through creative writing courses , he got to know Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison as well as the author Sandra Cisneros , who has a similar family background to his, is assigned to Chicano literature and deals with the problem of a bicultural background. Both authors motivated him to try his hand at writing.

He financed his college studies by delivering billiard tables, as a kitchen helper, as a worker at gas stations and in the steel industry. In an interview referring to his college experience, Díaz said:

“I can safely say that I saw the United States from the bottom ... As an individual, I may be a success story. But if you turn the knob back and put it on the family unit, I would say my family is telling a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two children who are in prison. It tells a story of immense poverty and tremendous difficulties. "

In his collection of short stories, Drown , the father's absence is a recurring motif. This reflects Díaz's difficult relationship with his own father, with whom he is no longer in contact. When Díaz criticized Dominicans' treatment of Haitians in an article for a Dominican newspaper, his father wrote a letter to the editor saying that his son should go home to Haiti.

After graduating from Rutgers University with a bachelor's degree, he worked briefly for Rutgers University Press as an assistant to the editor. During this time Díaz invented the semi-autobiographical figure Yunior for a short story with which he applied for a grid program at the beginning of the 1990s. This character plays a bigger role in both Drown and This is How You Lose Her . Diaz later explained that his original idea was to write five or six novels with Yunior as the main character.

Díaz received his Masters from Cornell University in Ithaca , where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

In April 2018 he published the autobiographical text "The Silence" in the New Yorker, in which he described the grave consequences for his entire life of being raped at the age of eight by a man he originally trusted.

He currently teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He lives in New York and Boston , and he is one of the founders of the “Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop”, which is aimed specifically at black Americans. Díaz himself writes in English , even if his mother tongue is Spanish .

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His short stories appeared in The New Yorker , which lists him as one of the twenty most important writers of the 21st century. His early collection of short stories, Drown, is now considered an important work of contemporary literature; However, this classification only came about when the publication of his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has received several literary prizes , led to a re-evaluation of his early work. After the first publication, the short story collection was discussed in numerous publications, but received divided reception. The stories in Drown focus on the impoverished, fatherless youth of the first-person narrator in the Dominican Republic and his struggle to adapt to his new life in New Jersey.

In September 2007, Miramax secured the rights to film the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Díaz worked eleven years (1996–2007) on this first novel, which references Herman Melville , Franz Kafka , David Foster Wallace and Homer and which quotes the history of the Dominican Republic.

Prizes and awards

Díaz received the Eugene McDermott Award 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship , the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, the PEN / Malamud Award 2002, a US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003 , a Fellowship of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , of which he has been a member since 2017.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Oscar Wao also won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel 2007, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Price for Fiction 2008, the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award 2008 and the Massachusetts Book Prize 2008 for fiction. Díaz also won the James Beard Foundation's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for his essay “He'll Take El Alto,” which appeared in Gourmet September 2007. In 2012 Díaz received a MacArthur Fellowship .

bibliography

novel
Short stories
  • Ysrael ( Story. Autumn 1995)
  • How To Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie ( The New Yorker. December 25, 1995)
  • Drown. (EV: Riverhead, New York 1996) Faber & Faber, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-571-24497-3 .
  • Fiesta 1980 ( Story. Winter 1996)
  • The Sun, The Moon, The Stars ( The New Yorker. February 2, 1998)
  • Otravida, Otravez ( The New Yorker. June, 21, 1999)
  • Flaca ( Story. Autumn 1999)
  • Nilda ( The New Yorker. October 4, 1999)
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ( The New Yorker. December 25, 2000)
  • Wildwood ( The New Yorker. November 18, 2007)
  • Alma ( The New Yorker. December 24, 2007)
  • This is how you loose her. Riverside, New York City 2012, ISBN 978-1-59448-736-1 .
    • And so you lose her. Translated from the English by Eva Kemper. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-013922-1 .
Essays
  • Homecoming, with Turtle ( The New Yorker. June 14, 2004)
  • He'll Take El Alto ( Gourmet. September, 2007)
  • Summer Love, Overheated ( GQ . August, 2008)

literature

  • Contreras Jaime Perales, Tovar Wendolyn Lozano: Two Pulitzer Prize (Junot Diaz and Oscar Hijuelos) Talk to Literal Magazine . Latin American Voices. Winter 2008-2009.
  • Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien: The Exploding Planet of Junot Diaz . in Granta online.
  • Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien: The Shit That's Other: Junot Diaz. In: Weird English. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2004.
  • Raphael Dalleo, Elena Machado Sáez: Moving On Up and Out: Lowercase Latino / a Realism in the Work of Junot Díaz and Angie Cruz. In: The Latino / a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007.
  • John Robert Lennon: Writers at Cornell: Interview with Junot Díaz . February 22, 2007.
  • Lucia Suarez: The tears of Hispaniola. Haitian and Dominican diaspora memory. University Press of Florida, Gainesville 2006.
  • Junot Díaz: Writer, Tigre, Ghetto Nerd, College Professor. In: Lucero. 14, 2003; Interview.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacquelyn Loss: Junot Díaz .. In: Alan West-Durán (Ed.): Latino and Latina Writers. Charles Scribner's Sons , Detroit 2003, pp. 803-816.
  2. ↑ The Brief Wondrous Life of Junot Diaz… So Far. (No longer available online.) In: Splash of Red. November 30, 2009, archived from the original on February 22, 2014 ; accessed on February 17, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / splashofred.squarespace.com
  3. ^ Adriana V. López: The Importance of Being Junot — A Pulitzer, Spanglish, and Oscar Wao. In: Criticas Magazine. November 1, 2008, archived from the original on March 3, 2010 ; accessed on February 11, 2014 .
  4. ↑ Hao Ying: Writing wrongs. (No longer available online.) In: Global Times. April 14, 2010, archived from the original on December 12, 2013 ; accessed on February 17, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The original quote is "I can safely say I've seen the US from the bottom up ... I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit , I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty. " @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.globaltimes.cn
  5. ↑ "Guest DJ: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Junot Diaz", by Jasmine Garsd, September 6, 2012. NPR music Alt Latino, September 6, 2012, accessed February 17, 2013 .
  6. ↑ a b Interview: Junot Díaz Talks Dying Art, the Line Between Fact and Fiction, and What Scares Him Most. Complex, December 17, 2012, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Junot Díaz: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma . In: The New Yorker . ( newyorker.com [accessed July 28, 2018]).
  8. ^ MIT, Writing and Humanistic Studies. Retrieved February 23, 2012. Writing.mit.edu, accessed June 3, 2012 .
  9. ↑ Michiko Kakutani: Travails of an Outcast. In: The New York Times. September 4, 2007, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  10. ↑ David Gates: From A Sunny Mordor to The Garden State: Junot Díaz's first novel is worth all the waiting. In: Newsweek . September 10, 2007, accessed February 17, 2014 .
  11. ↑ arts.mit.edu
  12. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 13, 2019 .
  13. ↑ mercantilelibrary.org ( Memento of the original dated May 31, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mercantilelibrary.org
  14. ↑ Junot Diaz wins big award for 'Oscar Wao'. CNN, April 7, 2008, accessed April 8, 2008 .
  15. ↑ en: Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
  16. ↑ daytondailynews.com
  17. ↑ massbook.org ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.massbook.org
  18. ↑ gourmet.com
personal data
SURNAME Díaz, Junot
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-Dominican writer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Santo Domingo