“Your father - your mother likes to brag - could never get enough of these. But given the fact that he ran off on her in their third year of marriage, it seemed in the end he could.” The audience can’t stop laughing as Díaz reads from his much-praised novel ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’. The book’s main character is Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican boy from New Jersey, who is preoccupied with science fiction, fantasy novels, falling in love and the curse that has plagued his Dominican family for generations. In the part that Díaz here reads from the narrative changes to the point of view of Oscar’s sister Lola, who has a strained relationship to their Old World Dominican mother.

Junot Díaz (b. 1968) was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of short stories ‘Drown’ (1996), the novel ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and ‘This Is How You Lose Her’ (2012), a collection of short-stories which became a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. Diaz is also a Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the fiction editor at Boston Review and a co-founder of VONA/Voices, the only multi-genre workshop for writers of colour in America.

Junot Díaz read from his novel ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ (2007) at the Louisiana Literature festival at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in 2011.

Read more about the author at: http://www.junotdiaz.com/

Camera: Honey Biba Beckerlee
Edited by: Kamilla Bruus
Produced by: Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015

Supported by Nordea-fonden