Junot Díaz, winner of the Pulitzer of the United States, will be one of the honored literary guests at the 11th International Book Fair of Santo Domingo 2008.  

It will be the first time the Dominican writer will participate in a public activity in the his native country since he won the most prestigious U.S. literary award.

Awarded for his novel  “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”  (La prodigiosa vida breve de Oscar Wao), Díaz will appear in the Café Bohemia at the Book Fair on Thursday May 1^st at 5:30 p.m. It will be the first time the Dominican writer will participate in a public activity in the his native country since he won the most prestigious U.S. literary award.

Díaz, a Professor in the Humanities Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was awarded the prize in the category of fiction. Prior to that, he had won other literary prizes in the United States.

The writer, born in the Dominican Republic, emigrated with his family to the United States when he was seven years old. They moved to New Jersey.

Díaz relates the difficult immigration experience in his writing. “Drown” (Ahogado), translated as “Negocios” in Spanish and published in 1996, is a collection of stories that had been published in prestigious literary magazines. The first of his stories, "Ysrael," was initially published in the literary magazine Story and later in The Paris Review and the New Yorker.

Díaz, 40 years old, has received several other prizes including the "Pushcart Prize XXII" (1997), the "Eugene McDermott Award" (1998), and a "Guggenheim Fellowship" in 1999.