Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We met at the IFOA in Toronto, and talked about, among other things, genocide, storytelling as a way to give voice to lost life, unique characters, 9/11 and America’s dual response: Why don’t they like us? and We’re gonna bomb them into the stone age; gaps, how to inject humour and energy into a text, and the Dominican Republic as the egg from which the U.S. eagle sprang.