Meet writer Hernan Diaz who in 2023 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Trust. The story evolves in the 1920s and 1930s New York, and it could be argued that the city itself is a character in the book. Diaz, who moved to New York a quarter of a century ago, has lived in Brooklyn ever since.

“How radically different those worlds on either side of the river were at the time. On one side, on Wall Street, a wealth unknown, opulence, modernity on steroids. On the other side of the river, in Brooklyn, you had blood traction, horses and people living in premodern conditions. That gap was very visible.”

Hernan Diaz, born in 1973 in Argentina, grew up in Sweden. He spoke Spanish at home, but Swedish was his first language interacting with the world. Since he has spent most of his life in the United States, English became his preferred language of writing. He holds a PhD from New York University, is the associate director of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University and serves as the managing editor of the Spanish-language journal Revista Hispánica Moderna. Furthermore, he is the author of a book about the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into thirty-three languages. His first novel, In the Distance, from 2017, was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. His second novel, Trust, published in 2022, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.

Diaz has published stories and essays in – among others – The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, and McSweeney’s. A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, the Rockefeller Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Ingmar Bergman Estate.

Hernan Diaz was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at the New York Public Library in August 2022.

Camera: Sebastian Lasaosa Rogers
Edited by: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling.

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