Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer

One of the most wonderful novelists I've ever interviewed was named wiinner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature yesterday. Juno Diaz is a native of the Dominican Republic while also being a native of New Jersey.

His book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, tells the story of a geeky immigrant kid who loves to write and dreams of being the Dominican JRR Tolkien. I spoke with Junot last fall at the KBOO studios, one of those interviews with someone you had never heard of but after conducting a Google Five Point Search, you suddenly discover he's very, very famous among those who have heard of him.

Plus, wonderful, intelligent, sexy and political; my favorite part of the interview was his analysis on why more and more people should be encouraged to write fiction -- because, he said, where there are more writers, there are more readers. And in the US of A, fewer and fewer people read books.

Here's the interview.