Argentine Hernán Díaz (Buenos Aires, 1973) shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in the Fiction category with American Barbara Kingsolver. Díaz won the award with the Roman Trust, originally published in English and translated into Spanish as Fortuna. The award-winning fiction takes place between 1920 and 1930 and places money at the center of human relationships.
The jury defined Fortuna as “a fascinating novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through crossed narratives and growing up in diverse literary styles, a complex analysis of love and power in a land where capitalism reigns supreme.” is.
The award-winning novel, now being adapted as a television series on HBO, is polyphonic and choral. It is divided into four parts: a novella, an autobiographical profile of billionaire Andrew Bevel, the memoirs of a secretary and fragments of the diary of the tycoon’s wife. The sum of the parts is an ambitious X-ray of the gears that move Wall Street.
Since its publication a year ago, the book has been praised by critics and figures such as former US President Barack Obama. Fortuna has sparked interest beyond the literary circles by becoming popular in the world of American high finance as well.
“I fell in love with English”
Díaz is the son of an Argentine couple who went into exile in Sweden after the 1976 coup when Díaz was just three years old. After the return of democracy, the family returned to the country and Díaz earned his degree in literature before continuing his studies in London and New York, where he has lived for 25 years.
“I don’t write in English because I’ve lived here for 25 years. It’s the other way around, I’m here for English. Before coming to New York, I lived in London for two years. I started reading literature in English when I was young, and for some reason I found this tradition irresistibly challenging on an affective level. I fell in love with the language; It sounds cheesy, but there’s no other way to explain it,” he told EL PAÍS in an interview a few months ago.
Díaz debuted another extraordinary novel in 2017, Far Away, a Western that subverted the laws of the genre and was a Pulitzer finalist.
For his next book, the writer decided to focus on the role that wealth plays in American national identity. “I was surprised that there really aren’t any novels about money in the United States, a country where money has an almost mystical dimension. It’s very hard to imagine what those titles would be. The novels that we associate directly with money are actually class novels,” he said in the interview.
Another Argentine, photographer Rodrigo Abd, also received a Pulitzer on Monday. The Journalism Awards’ Breaking News category recognized the work of seven Associated Press photographers covering the war in Ukraine, including Abd.
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