The British writer LP Hartley opened his novel “The Go-Between” with an unforgettable line “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” There’s a long-standing idea of literature being a vehicle to explore these “foreign countries”, be they temporal or geographical or cultural. 

My guest today has been one of the most innovative voices with regard to the immigrant experience, especially through his 2007 novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for that novel, thanks to its incredibly modern story-telling. The prose was insane, with different characters’ vernacular switching on and off, the timelines, inspirations, characters felt incredibly fresh and exciting. It’s the story of a young Dominican-American boy who navigates this new world of America, whilst pining for the homeland of the Dominican Republican, and he copes with this, and with the turmoil of adolescence, by immersing himself in typical teen nerd culture of comics, and sci-fi. If you haven’t read that book, then I strongly suggest that you do.

Junot Diaz is now a Professor of Creative Writing at MIT (the Massachussetts Institute of Technology) as well as a contributing editor to the Boston Review of Fiction. In this episode, we talk about his inspirations for his work, his process and what makes him tick as an artist.

A list of the books mentioned in the episode:

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