Carolina De Robertis has won the 2022 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, given annually “to a talented American writer who experiments with form, explores a range of voices and deserves more recognition.”
De Robertis made their literary debut in 2009 with the novel The Invisible Mountain, which they followed up three years later with Perla. Their other novels include The Gods of Tango; Cantoras, a Kirkus Prize finalist; and, most recently, The President and the Frog, which was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein and PEN/Faulkner awards.
Brandon Haffner, the Dos Passos Prize committee chair, said that De Robertis “makes audible the beating hearts of people navigating a terrifying world.”
“But De Robertis’ stories aren’t so much interested in exploiting that terror for narrative suspense as they are in interrogating what compassion and resilience look like in the face of confounding policies and state violence,” Haffner said.
The Dos Passos Prize, which is given by Longwood University in Virginia, was first awarded in 1980. Previous winners have included Tom Wolfe, John Edgar Wideman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Danzy Senna, and Aleksandar Hemon.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
