Junot DÃaz
Junot Díaz ( born December 31, 1968 in Santo Domingo ) is an American writer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for creative writing. The focus of Díaz 's oeuvre is the duality of the experience of immigrants. For his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, he received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the Anisfield - Wolf Book Award. Stylistically, many of his works are associated with the Magic Realism.
Life
Díaz was born in Villa Juana, a district of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). He spent the third child of five children of his first six years with his mother and his grandparents while his father Rafael Díaz worked in the United States. In December 1974, the family emigrated to Parlin ( NJ ) to get the father to reconnect. In New Jersey, the family lived less than a mile from a landfill, which described Diaz as one of the largest in New Jersey.
In New Jersey, he attended the primary school " Madison Park Elementary " and developed early -seeking at a voracious reader who often ran four miles to borrow from the local public library books. Very early he developed a fascination with apocalyptic films and books, including particularly the works of John Christopher, the British mini-series on the edge of darkness as well as the first movie series Planet of the Apes (1968-1973), which on the original novel by Pierre Boulle oriented. In 1987, he graduated from high school.
He began his college years at Kean College in Union Township, New Jersey, after a year but at the Rutgers University, where his main field of study was English literature. Through creative writing courses he learned both the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and the author Sandra Cisneros know, where the latter. Across a similar family background as he has and which is attributed to the Chicano literature that deals with the problem of a bicultural background Both authors motivated him to try out as a writer. His college studies he financed among other things by the delivery of pool tables, a kitchen help, as workers at gas stations and in the steel industry. In an interview, in which he refers to his experiences during the college years, Díaz said:
" I can say with certainty that I have seen the lower side of the United States ... As an individual, I like to be a success story. But if you are just a bit back rotates the knob and looks at the family from which I come, then I would argue that my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two children who are in prison. She tells a story of enormous poverty and immense difficulties. "
In his short story collection Drown the absence of the father is a repeating motif. This reflects Díaz ' difficult relationship with his own father, with whom he no longer is in contact. As Díaz criticized the treatment of Haitians by Dominicans in an article for a Dominican newspaper, his father wrote a letter to the editor, in which he held, then he should go to Haiti home.
After completing his undergraduate degree at Rutgers University, he worked briefly for the Rutgers University Press as assistant to the publisher. At this time Díaz invented for a short story with which he competed among others in the early 1990s for a scanning program, the semi- autobiographical character Yunior. This figure plays a larger role in both Drown and in This is How You Lose Her. Diaz later explained that it was originally his idea to write five or six novels with Yunior as the main character that would ultimately form a larger narrative work.
His master made Díaz at Cornell University in Ithaca, where he wrote most of his first short story collection. Currently, Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His life center is New York City and Boston and one of the founders of the "Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop ," which aimed specifically at colored Americans. Díaz himself writes in English, even if his mother language is Spanish.
Work
His short stories appeared in The New Yorker, which lists him as one of the 20 most important writers of the 21st century. His early short story collection Drown is now regarded as an important work of contemporary literature; to this classification it came but it was not until the publication of his award-winning literary prizes novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao led to a reassessment of his early work. After the first appearance of the short story collection had indeed been discussed in numerous publications, but was split recording. The stories in Drown focus on the impoverished, fatherless youth of the narrator in the Dominican Republic and his efforts to adapt to his new life in New Jersey.
In September 2007, the rights to Miramax film adaptation of the novel secured The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Manufactures On this first novel, the references to Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, David Foster Wallace and Homer and cites the history of the Dominican Republic, Junot Díaz has worked eleven years ( 1996-2007 ).
Prizes and awards
Díaz was awarded the Eugene McDermott Award in 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, the PEN / Malamud Award 2002, 2003, a U.S. Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize- winning ... Oscar Wao also the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel in 2007, the Anisfield - Wolf Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Price for Fiction in 2008, the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award 2008 as well as the Massachusetts Book Prize 2008 for Fiction. Díaz also won the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation, " He'll Take El Alto " that appeared on the Paper Gourmet September 2007. 2012 received a MacArthur Fellowship Díaz.
Bibliography
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead, New York 2007 ISBN 9781594489587 ( German title: .. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao translation from American English by Eva Kemper Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009 ISBN 978-3-10-013920-7 ) ( As an audio book read by Jan Josef Liefers. )
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Audiobook read by Andreas Pietschmann, Argon Verlag, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-86610-724-3
- Ysrael (Story, Autumn 1995)
- How To Date A Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie (The New Yorker, December 25, 1995)
- Drown. (EV: Riverhead, New York 1996) Faber & Faber, London 2008 ISBN 0-571244971
- 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)
- And you will lose them. Translated from English by Eva Kemper, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-013922-1.
- Homecoming, with Turtle (The New Yorker, June 14, 2004 )
- He'll Take El Alto (Gourmet, September, 2007)
- Summer Love, Overheated ( GQ, August, 2008)