Matt Raymond from the Library of Congress speaks with Junot Diaz, who will appear at the 2009 National Book Festival on September 26, 2009, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Biography

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and is the author of the short-story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (hardback 2007, paperback 2008), which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times said the novel is “so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, “Best American Short Stories” (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), “Pushcart Prize XXII” and “The O’Henry Prize Stories 2009.”