Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Díaz joins the Westport community for a keynote conversation on the 2025 WestportREADS selection, In the Distance, Díaz’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-nominated debut novel about a young Swedish immigrant who travels east from California in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west.
Díaz will be in conversation with Nina Sankovitch, author of American Rebels and The Lowells of Massachusetts.
About Hernan Díaz
Díaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of two novels published in 37 languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”
His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.
Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by more than 30 publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO, and it has been named one of The New York Times’s Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.
Díaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.
He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others.
Díaz holds a PhD from NYU and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.
About Nina Sankovitch
Sankovitch is the author of several nonfiction books, including American Rebels and The Lowells of Massachusetts. She has written for the New York Times, the Huffington Post as a contributing blogger, and was formerly a judge for The Book of the Month Club. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, Sankovitch grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and currently lives in Connecticut with her family.
About WestportREADS
Created in 2002, WestportREADS is a way for the Westport community to bond over a book and is designed to deepen our community’s engagement in literature.
Throughout January and February, there will be events and programs centered on In the Distance, book discussions, celebrations, and much more. It is a chance to not only read a great book but to engage with the community, meet new people, and celebrate our shared love of reading.
WestportREADS is funded by the estate of Jerry A. Tishman.
