Junot Diaz is an early bird, it seems. He first suggests a call at 5. EWWC: You must be very busy. JD: Australia was one of the first places that I ever got invited to as a writer, so I have a lot of affection for the place. I met a lot of really interesting, smart people who were involved in a lot of activism around immigration, and they became real friends. Also, the literary culture both in Melbourne and Sydney is incredibly vibrant, and on the personal side, a lot of what is happening in Australia, vis-a-vis immigration and bizarre politics, feels familiar to me.
So for me, that makes Australia an incredibly interesting model. The other thing was that the first novel I ever attempted to write, when I was a senior in high school, was a ridiculous Stephen King pastiche set in, of all places, Australia. What did you make of the Conference? It almost becomes a human rights issue to make the arts available to people. I think that the Conference was enormously successful. For me the historical nature of those events cannot be overplayed, it cannot be over-exaggerated.
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For many, many of us β for me coming from the Dominican Republic β the whole theme of a national literature is not a minor question, not an irrelevant question. And to be able to thrash that out I thought was not only valuable, but historic β and really important.
Have the awards changed anything for you at all? So frequently magazines will list a top hundred contemporary writers and not a single one of those writers are Latino; in the last year I can think of three such lists and in every single one, all the Latino writers were left out.
Now, we all seem to have given up β for the moment β on fiction. Genres rise and genres fall. Today the novel is predominant in the US but perhaps tomorrow perhaps it will be spoken word poetry. Who is to say and more vexing, who can ever know? For me what matters is that we defend literary culture as vigorously as we can.
