Hernan Diaz – Author Biography
Early Life
Hernan Diaz was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When he was two, his family fled to Sweden after the military coup, returning to Argentina when democracy was restored. He studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, earned a master’s degree at King’s College London, and then moved to New York in 1999, where he completed a Ph.D. at New York University.
Career
Diaz is the associate director of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University and the managing editor of the journal Revista Hispánica Moderna. He published a scholarly book on Jorge Luis Borges before turning to fiction. His debut novel, In the Distance (2017), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His second novel, Trust (2022), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, shared with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.
Major Works
In the Distance (2017) — a revisionist Western about a young Swedish immigrant wandering the American frontier — Trust (2022) — a puzzle-box novel about wealth, narrative, and a 1920s Wall Street titan told through competing documents — and Borges, Between History and Eternity (2012), his work of criticism. His novels have been translated into dozens of languages.
Writing Style and Themes
Diaz writes formally daring literary fiction obsessed with how stories get told and who gets to tell them. Trust nests a novel within a memoir within an autobiography within a diary, each version undermining the last. His great themes are capital and narrative: how money and storytelling alike manufacture reality, and how the American Dream looks from the outside. His prose is precise, elegant, and quietly devastating, shaped by his trilingual life — he has said foreignness has determined his entire existence.
Legacy
With only two novels, Diaz has already won a Pulitzer, a Kirkus Prize, and a Whiting Award, and been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Trust was a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and is being developed as an HBO limited series. He is widely regarded as one of the most important American novelists of his generation.
