2020 Winner: Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020). His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, awarded the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre. His short stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story and Lapham’s Quarterly; in 2014 he was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
Watch the Meet the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Event.
“I am deeply honored to receive the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In a world that has changed so much over the past few months, it is bracing to see New Literary Project continuing its mission to promote creative writing. My writing has increasingly turned towards this current time, and I will use the prize to continue new work set here in California. The prize is also a return to a home of sorts, as it was in Berkeley (its cafes, its University libraries) that many of the stories of A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth took form. Though the pandemic will likely change the structure of a residency, I look forward to meeting members of the Berkeley English Department and the Lafayette Library and Learning Center, whether virtually or (I hope) in person.”
The Winter Soldier is a deeply moving, imaginatively audacious achievement: the evoking of a bygone world with such precision, such richness of detail and empathy, the reader is reminded of those scenes in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that bring us into the very narrative, as if we were, not readers peering back into an historic past, but contemporaries of that past caught up in its heartrending drama. Those with a particular interest in the history of medical science will be fascinated by Daniel Mason’s young doctor’s medical adventures in the most primitive of settings—the battlefield.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Daniel Mason is a transporting writer of prodigious imagination and power. He writes with such immense confidence that readers are invited to take the leap— into the past as well as into themselves. In fact, he challenges us to re-think the very concept of historical fiction. Because in his breathtakingly beautiful prose, he simultaneously compels us to reimagine and re-engage our present world. “Timeless” is a descriptor often casually invoked by reviewers, though it is most deserving in the case of Daniel Mason’s enduring work. He elegantly represents the Prize’s aspirations, because he is an emerged writer whose prospective, continual emergence promises to be limitless.
—Joseph Di Prisco, Chair, New Literary Project
It is an enormous pleasure and privilege to work with Daniel Mason, a writer I admired long before I ever had the chance to communicate with him directly. His writing is at once lush and precise, his evocation of his settings so immersive that the reader feels completely transported to another place and time, whether it be a ravaged WWI field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains, a jungle in nineteenth-century Burma, or an asylum in midtwentieth-century Rio de Janeiro. Above all, what Daniel Mason does so brilliantly is depict the intimate truths of the human heart and condition through characters who seem to live and breathe and love and suffer—who strive and seek, doubt themselves, fail, and strive again—no less urgently or convincingly than we his readers do. During this uncertain time, many of us have turned to literature for comfort, escape, inspiration, and understanding. For me, it is the books and authors who are the real thing who now truly hold up and effectively bring this much-needed relief and perspective. Daniel Mason is unquestionably one of these, and I feel certain that his work will hold up and be read years and decades from now. He could not be more deserving of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and I cannot wait to read what he does next.
—Asya Muchnick, Vice President and Executive Editor, Little, Brown and Company