Junot Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He also wrote This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.
Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic in 1968, Díaz and his siblings lived in Santo Domingo with their mother while his father went to the United States to work. His father sent for his family when Díaz was seven and the family lived in a poor part of New Jersey populated primarily by Dominicans.
Díaz attended Rutgers University and received his Bachelors degree in History and Literature. He then pursued a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Cornell. It was there that he began to write the short stories that eventually formed his first published collection entitled Drown (1996). Yunior, a young Dominican immigrant who would later narrate Díaz’s first novel, narrates the stories in the collection.
Drown received critical acclaim from many sources, and soon Díaz was more popular in the literary world than he ever imagined he would be. The book was also translated into Spanish and published under the title Negocios in 1997.
However, after his success, Díaz found it difficult to write. In fact, it was another eleven years before he was able to complete another work of creative fiction.
Central to Díaz’s work is the immigrant experience. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a work of fiction, however the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with the Dominican Republic experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. The book chronicles the life of Oscar De León, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, and also explores the curse that has plagued his family for generations.
Narrated by multiple characters, the novel incorporates a significant amount of Spanglish and neologisms as it explores its overarching theme of the fukú curse. Rife with footnotes, science fiction and fantasy references, comic book analogies, and various Spanish dialects, the novel is also a meditation on story-telling, the Dominican diaspora and identity, masculinity, and oppression.
Díaz is known for his spare narrative style, and his seamless integration of Spanish into his English text. Both Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explore the violence history of the Dominican Republic, and the violence that occurs on an everyday basis in the lives of the characters.
In 1999, Diaz co-founded the Voices of Our Nation Workshop (VONA). Along with Elmaz Abindar, Victor Diaz and Diem Jones, they envisioned an arts organization that could change the landscape for writers of colour by supporting individual writer growth, creating a platform for community engagement and providing a workshops to expand writing opportunities. Over 2000 writers from around the world have participated in VONA.
Díaz is currently a senior faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fiction editor for The Boston Review, a MacArthur Fellow, and sits on the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Macau artist Eric Fok is just one of the talented visual artists participating in this year’s
The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival
Young Macau artist Eric Fok has announced that he will present a brand new piece of work that he has specially created for the Macau Literary Festival, together with other art pieces from his previous collections.
Eric is particularly well known for his excellent techniques and creative ideas, blending both historical and present-day aspects of Macau into his works. His elegant technical illustration collection Paradise was selected for a number of awards, including the renowned ‘Bologna Illustrators Exhibition’ in 2013.
For the Paradise collection, Eric chose a creative and interesting way to interpret today’s Macau presenting it in the stlye of old Western maps. Looking at this collection, one has the feeling of stepping back into the history of Macau. The style of map is inspired by those used and created by the early Portuguese explorers who set out on their adventures to the Far East and arrived in Macau in the mid-1500’s. Centuries later, this tiny city has become a melting pot of Eastern and Western cultures, and in his artwork Eric presents the new adventure being undertaken in Macau, depicting images of rapid development juxtaposed on an old-style map – a perfect echo of the city’s history.
“It was 2011 to 2012 when I was drawing the Paradise collection, the peak of the gambling industry development in Macau and everything was changing so fast,” says Eric. “Macau could hardly keep up with the pace at that time and that led to many social problems. So I came up with the idea to reflects today’s Macau in an old map. It presents a feeling of time travel.”
Artists often find inspiration in their hometowns and connect it to their art work in their own unique way. This sense of belonging can increase as one gets to know and understand more about the place’s origins and what it is has gone through.
“I am amazed as I research more about Macau’s history. It always surprises me when I find out that the places I go to were once the sea. There are so many places in Macau that are reclaimed land. This inspired me to show the changes of the coastline of Macau throughout these years in my work,” Eric explains. “For me it is always a process of learning while I draw, to reveal the history of Macau and to discover more untold stories.”
Speaking about his plans for his exhibition at The Script Road, Eric reveals that it is still a work in progress.
“At this stage I am still conceptualising it. My idea is to connect an ancient Chinese poet with a technical drawing. I am not sure if I will change my mind when I draw, but for now I would like to present it in a Chinese reel painting. Nonetheless I still need to study more about the poet so I can make up my mind,” Eric admits.
Today there is a trend of combining different fields of art to create new interpretations, for example combining digital mapping with historical heritage architecture.
“To combine literature with drawing is also a new attempt for me, so I am looking forward to the final product and seeing how it will turn out.”
+ Cinema
+ Visual arts
For more details about The Script Road and the complete programme of events go to
www.thescriptroad.org
