03 Oct 2012 16:04:00
Junot Díaz's debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won him a Pulitzer; his short story collections brought him international acclaim. Now the 43-year-old's "spare, unsentimental prose" and "raw, vernacular dialogue" have landed him a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" grant.
Twenty-three new MacArthur fellows were named by the MacArthur Foundation yesterday. They will each receive a no-strings-attached grant of $500,000 over the next five years – widely known as a "genius" grant – to allow them "unprecedented freedom and opportunity to reflect, create, and explore". From a geochemist to a paediatric neurosurgeon, to the authors Díaz and Dinaw Mengestu and the historian Dylan C Penningroth, the fellows were all chosen "for their creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the future".
Díaz, said the foundation, offers "powerful insight into the realities of the Caribbean diaspora, American assimilation, and lives lived between cultures" in his novel and two collections of short stories, Drown and This Is How You Lose Her. Born in the Dominican Republic but resident in the US since his teens, the author "eloquently" unmasks the immigrant's life, said the foundation, creating "nuanced and engaging characters struggling to succeed and often invisible in plain sight to the American mainstream".
Each fellow is told of his or her grant in a phone call "out of the blue", said the foundation. Díaz said it would be "transformational". "It allows you to focus on your art with very little other concerns. It's kind of like a big blast of privilege," said the author, who is also a professor at MIT.
The 34-year-old Ethiopian-born Mengestu, author of the novels The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air, was awarded his MacArthur grant for "enriching [the] understanding of the little-explored world of the African diaspora in America in tales distilled from the experience of immigrants whose memories are seared by escape from violence in their homelands".
Mengestu said that when he received the phone call about the $500,000 (£310,000) grant, he was in Africa, at a books festival in Nairobi. "It was obviously amazingly overwhelming and at the same time felt remarkably appropriate to be there and to be in a community that I felt I was desperately trying to reach out to," said the author and journalist. "Part of what the MacArthur fellowship does is remind me that the work I've done is relevant – not necessarily what I write about, but the people who populate my work. That those people have a significance and meaning that sometimes might be overshadowed or lost in the larger narrative of the world, and it's important to keep writing out of those experiences."
Historian Penningroth, author of The Claims of Kinfolk, was given his grant for "unearthing evidence from widely scattered archives to shed light on shifting concepts of property ownership and kinship among African American slaves and their descendents following emancipation".
Previous recipients of MacArthur awards include The Wire creator David Simon and the novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yiyun Li and Cormac McCarthy, with 873 people picked since the programme was set up in 1981. The fellows are selected following a series of formal suggestions by hundreds of anonymous nominators, with a committee of around 12 members – also anonymous – making final recommendations to the foundation.
Robert Gallucci, the president of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, said that this year's 23 fellows "demonstrate the power of creativity".
"The MacArthur fellowship is not only a recognition of their impressive past accomplishments but also, more importantly, an investment in their potential for the future," he said. "We believe in their creative instincts and hope the freedom the fellowship provides will enable them to pursue unfettered their insights and ideas for the benefit of the world."
