Quote by Junot Díaz: “You want to know what it's like to live with an absence? Try being haunted.”

The experience of diaspora — of being separated from a homeland, a culture, a language — is not a gap you fill in over time. It is a presence that follows you: a haunting that shapes how you feel in every new place you try to belong.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published in 2007 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The novel weaves the history of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic with the experience of Dominican immigrants in New Jersey, insisting that the past inhabits the present like a literal ghost.

Dominican-American novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao brought Caribbean immigrant experience to international literary attention. His work blends Spanish, English, and science fiction to explore diaspora, masculinity, and political violence.