Novelist Edwidge Danticat Named 2018 Winner of Neustadt International Prize for Literature

November 15, 2017

Edwidge Danticat On Thursday November 9, the University of Oklahoma, in partnership with World Literature Today magazine, announced Edwidge Danticat as the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

“Danticat experiments with form and structure and frequently references the literary history of Haiti and the Caribbean. She paints scenes of immigrant life in New York and Miami with fresh details and palpable familiarity,” the Neustadt announcement read.

Danticat, a Haitian-American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, is the 25th selection of the biennial prize. She has also claimed a Pushcart Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, and other notable accomplishments.

Achy Obejas, one of the eight jurors for the prize, wrote that Danticat’s work “addresses how the specter of history haunts the unresolved present.”

The Neustadt International Prize for Literature, often referred to as the “American Nobel,” awards $50,000 to an acclaimed author selected by a panel of international writers. Notable past winners include writers such as Elizabeth Bishop (1976), Czeslaw Milosz (1978), Duo Duo (2010), and Dubravka Ugreši? (2016). In addition to the cash award, winners receive a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver.

Danticat will be a featured presenter at #AWP18 in Tampa, Florida.

Related reading: Danticat wrote about traveling to Grenada after Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck the Caribbean this summer for The New York Times Travel Section.

 

Photo credit: Lynn Savarese


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