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Hernan Diaz
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Hernan Diaz is the author of In the Distance, a gorgeously written page-turning epic tale that upends and reinvents the old-school western genre. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award, this extraordinary novel offers a probing examination of the stereotypes that populate America’s past, following a young Swedish immigrant as he travels through the American frontier in the 1800s, meeting religious fanatics, naturalists, gold miners, and more. In the Distance was a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and a Literary Hub Top 20 Book of the Decade.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, Trust, his latest novel, explores wealth, talent, and the process of accumulation of capital as the readers follow an enigmatic financier in the roaring 1920s. The new spellbinding work is an “intricate, cunning and consistently surprising…exhilarating and intelligent novel.” Diaz illuminates “the impact of money on American’s everyday life and confronts some of our deepest socioeconomic schisms.” According to the Booker Prize citation, “there is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty.” It was recently announced that this best-selling novel will be adapted into an HBO limited series starring Kate Winslet.
Hernan Diaz’s work has also appeared in many publications such as The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, and McSweeney’s. In his thoughtful conversations at colleges and universities, Diaz discusses the way he theorizes genre, the archival process behind his novels, the relationship between fiction and truth, and the place of foreigners in the conformation of the American canon.
A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, Hernan Diaz has received fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the Rockefeller Foundation, among other institutions. He holds a Ph.D. from New York University. He is the associate director of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University.
WHY HE’S JOINING US
Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by “The New York Times,” Hernan Diaz’s “Trust” is the novel that readers and critics can’t stop talking about: a brilliant historical tale about money that is also a mystery and a literary magic trick all in one. How he did it nobody knows – except the author himself, who will unpack his wonder cabinet of a book before your very eyes.
LATEST WORK
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
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Photo Credit: Pascal Perich
