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Hernan Diaz

Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust and In the Distance

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  • About Hernan Diaz

    Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in thirty-seven languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”

    His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.

    Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO, and it has been named one of the New York Times’s Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.

    His stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

    He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others.

    He holds a PhD from NYU and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.

    Contact us about booking Hernan Diaz for your next event.

  • Speaking Topics

    Trust

    In this lecture Hernan Diaz discusses his latest novel, Trust, translated into over twenty languages. By taking the audience on a backstage tour of the intense archival work that went into this book, Diaz revisits and expands on some of the timely issues in the novel: the representation of class and wealth in our literary canon, the place of capital in American literature, the distinction between fiction and truth—and how power consistently blurs the line between them. At the core of this discussion is a reflection on the very nature of literature and how, instead of merely copying reality, it may help shaping it.

    Blind Spots

    In both his novels—In the Distance, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Trust—Hernan Diaz addresses two blind spots in the American canon. The first concerns the territorial establishment of this nation: although many accounts glamorize the brutal expansion west, it took inordinately long for these narratives to coalesce into a genre—and once they did, they were largely marginalized. Not much later, America engaged in another sort of pursuit: a quest for economic supremacy. And though numerous books deal with class, conspicuous consumption, and manners, barely none addresses how money is actually made. These blind spots inspired In the Distance and Trust, respectively. This talk examines both the myths around the consolidation of our territory and the fables shrouding the origins of its wealth—and the connection between history and literature.

    In the Distance

    In the Distance, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize translated into more than twenty-five languages, is a novel that reexamines some of America’s foundational myths, including the Gold Rush, the great expansion west, and the literary genres that coalesced around the depiction of this historical period. This lecture explores the book’s themes, its formal approach, and the writing process behind it. What is the place of the Western in the American canon? How has nature writing informed our views of the environment? To what extent have these epic narratives shaped our perception of our history? How have foreign writers historically depicted the west, and how has their gaze transformed ours?

  • Video

  • Praise for Hernan Diaz

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    Diaz was an excellent speaker and a lovely guest. He was smart, thoughtful, and entertaining in the author talk/conversation, and he was very generous with the students from the Deep Read course, taking their questions and concerns seriously and treating them with intellectual respect. He was also very engaging with Zac Zimmer, his interlocutor at the event, as well as with the VIP guests at the post-event reception.

    Deep Read Program at The Humanities Institute, University of California – Santa Cruz
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    I know few people who are as brilliant as Hernan and are so kind and generous. The lecture was one of the best that I have had the privilege to hear. To be in the presence of his beautiful mind was a once in a lifetime experience for many of our patrons. Hernan did not use written notes for his lecture, which felt like a conversation, but one that is very well-structured. How he connected everything together was simply genius.

    He was so kind with our staff, volunteers, and patrons. He gave all his attention and energy to everyone that he talked to. Every conversation, even with the security staff, felt like the deepest engagement one has ever witnessed.

    Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures
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    Hernan’s talk was the perfect balance of thought-provoking, elucidating and entertaining. He provided insights into his writing process while speaking more broadly to the power of literature. Audience feedback includes, “Brilliant,” “One of the best ever,” and Absolutely fantastic.”

    Cuyahoga County Public Library
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    Hernan was fantastic! What an engaging and wonderful speaker he is, and he and Bill had a wonderful conversation – we could have gone on for another hour! He was so kind and gracious with all the folks who came up to get their book signed as well.

    Chicago Public Library
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    Hernan was a wonderful speaker and very engaged in the conversation with Paul Muldoon and Sarah Hart. We also loved the Q&A portion of the evening where students asked some unique questions that were met with thoughtful responses from the authors.

    Princeton University
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    Hernan Diaz was spectacular!

    Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

    Praise for Trust

    Hernan Diaz understands, and deeply, how strange money is, as an omnipotent and imaginary substance that controls our lives. His novel Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery. Its plotlines are as etched and surreal as Art Deco geometry, while inside that architecture are people who feel appallingly real. This novel is very classical and very original: Balzac would be proud, but so would Borges.

    Rachel Kushner

    Hernan Diaz is a narrative genius whose work easily encompasses both a grand scope and the crisp and whiplike line. Trust builds its world and characters with subtle aplomb. What a radiant, profound and moving novel.

    Though set in a historical New York, Trust speaks to matters of the most urgent significance to the present day. Money, power, class, marital and filial relations, the roles played by trust and betrayal in human affairs—Diaz’s development of his chosen themes is deeply insightful. Cleverly constructed and rich in surprises, this splendid novel offers serious ideas and serious pleasures on every beautifully composed page.

    That rare jewel of a book—jaw-dropping storytelling against the backdrop of beautiful writing. Amidst all the noise in the world, whole days found me curled up on the couch, lost inside Diaz’s brilliance.

    Jacqueline Woodson

    The audacity and scope of Hernan Diaz’s extraordinary novel— a prism, a mystery, a revelation—are brilliantly matched by the quality of his prose.

    Jean Strouse

    In this glorious puzzle of a novel, perspectives keep shifting and the wealth of one early-twentieth-century family keeps changing its origin-story. What a joy this is to read, suspenseful at every turn, the work of a rare and impressive talent. Hernan Diaz has once again taken apart an American myth and pondered how we lie to ourselves.

    Joan Silber

    Sublime, richly layered novel. A story within a story within a story. Elegantly written . . . This is just sublime.

    Roxane Gay

    Praise for In the Distance

    An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main character’s loneliness and grief. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty.

    New York Times

    A gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition.

    Pulitzer Prizes

    Hernan Diaz explores two kinds of wilderness: the immensely taxing newness of the American West and the still-forming interiority of Håkan, a Swedish immigrant desperate to find a way back home. It’s the second that makes the first feel new. He does this in language that can be plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative. Håkan’s epic journey reminds us how the self is often hammered into existence by pain and longing. In the end the reader understands the country’s twin potential for horror and hope.

    Whiting Award Selection Committee

    Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance is exquisite: assured, moving, and masterful, as profound and precise an evocation of loneliness as any book I’ve ever read.

    Lauren Groff

    Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments.

    Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

    While set in the American West, this is no conventional Western, as it turns the genre’s stereotypes upside down, taking place on a frontier as much mythic as real with a main character. . . . Resonant historical fiction with a contemporary feel.

    Library Journal, (starred review)

    . . . richly drawn and something like Huckleberry Finn written by Cormac McCarthy: an adventure story as well as a meditation on the meaning of home.

    The Times

    A gritty, dreamy anti-Western Western. This book’s unflinching exposure of our foundational American myths about individualism and violence is so well-executed that it feels nothing short of subversive.

    Literary Hub

    A page-turning adventure story that’s also a profound meditation on solitude and companionship, foreignness and home; a bildungsroman in the grand 19th-century tradition that is also a fierce critique of the romanticised myths of the settlement of the American west.

    The Guardian

    A western about the conquest of being.

    Le Monde

    If I could hand you this book I would. Read this. Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance is a portrait of this country as both a dreamscape and a living nightmare. With echoes of John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, Andrey Platonov’s Soul, and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, this is fiction at its finest—propulsive, unsettling, wildly ambitious, and an unforgettable journey that we will certainly return to in the years to come.

    Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain

    Hernan Diaz’s strange, absorbing novel In the Distance—the story of Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant whose journey in the American West is fraught with confusion, loss, loneliness and seclusion—upends the romance and mythology of America’s Western experience and rugged individualism.

    Star Tribune

    Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance will haunt me forever, a narrative that continues to astound me, and I think a near perfect portrayal of aloneness and solitude and deep longing.

    The Millions

    [In the Distance] is a good old-fashioned yearning of the human spirit, and a beautifully commodious meditation on its absolute unknowability.

    Financial Times

    An infectious story of one man’s quest for solitude and understanding, In the Distance is a noteworthy, original debut.

    The Gazette

    Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 2018, this strange, sinister tale bewitches, making the wild west of America as intense and otherworldly as any dark myth.

    The Irish Times

    Stitched through with humor, this often-unpredictable novel will keep readers running along with every step of Håkan’s odd escapades.

    Booklist

    As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs [Hawk’s] adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. . . . An ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.

    Kirkus

    Hernan Diaz can spin plates and crack walnuts at the same time. His dazzling novel is a continually unsettling reinvention of American landscape. He offers the treasure of that weird alienated understanding that comes from being a foreigner with roots in Argentina, Sweden and, of course, New York.

    Peter Carey

    One of the best books I’ve read all year.

    Roxane Gay
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