Junot DIAZ wins the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Oscar Wao!

JUNOT DIAZ’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007) has beaten Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Lore Segal’s Shakespeare’s Kitchen (The New Press, 2007) for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Diaz, who took eleven years to complete his first novel, said that in some ways The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a novel that waited for him to become a better person before it wrote itself. He is also the author of a collection of stories, Drown (1996). Oscar Wao is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Two prizes were awarded for poetry: Robert Haas’s Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007) and Philip Schultz’s Failure (Harcourt, 2007), beating Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton, 2007).