2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Announced
DANIEL MASON CHOSEN AS WINNER OF THE 2020 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE
Novelist Wins the Annual $50,000 Fiction Prize Recognizing Mid-Career Authors
Download the full press release (242 KB PDF)
Dear Simpsonistas,
We are elated to report that Daniel Mason is the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient. The Board of Directors selected Daniel from a most distinguished shortlist of finalists. The award-winning author of The Winter Soldier (Little, Brown), he is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, and author of four influential, powerful books of fiction, including the just published A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (Little, Brown). He will appear, it is hoped, in the Bay Area in October 2020 and participate in 10-day residency during the spring semester of 2021. He is the fourth winner of the annual $50,000 award.
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
Finalists for the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize
As happy as we are to welcome Daniel into the fold, we also want to highlight again the wonderful finalists: Chris Bachelder, Maria Dahvana Headley, Rebecca Makkai, Peter Orner, Dexter Palmer, and Kevin Wilson. These are writers who will reward the investment of your imaginative attention. And we think you will find each of their most recent books speaks presciently and robustly to our current circumstances. Once they publish new works of fiction, they immediately become longlisted for the next Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
Find out more about all the 2020 finalists
A Powerful Video from Laila Lalami, 2019 Prize winner
At the same time, we are also saying thanks to Laila Lalami, 2019 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient. As you all have appreciated, Laila has represented the Simpson Literary Project magnificently—even through these vexing days. She is an author of the first rank, and we are going to be following her avidly throughout what promises to be a magnificent future. When she was awarded the Prize last year, her The Moor’s Account generated tremendous praise and admiration, and that was followed up by The Other Americans, which was a National Book Award Finalist this year. She has a new nonfiction work scheduled for September publication, Conditional Citizens. Congratulations, Laila, and thank you for all you did for the Simpson Literary Project.
The coming months for the Simpson Literary Project promise to be filled with new opportunities for us to write and teach and read and learn and gather—even though it may be virtually for the time being.
Finally, thank you for your ongoing support of the Simpson Literary Project and your abundant good will.
All very best wishes, and all for now,
Diane and Joe