Lauren Groff is the winner of this year’s Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the New Literary Project announced.
The $50,000 award is given annually to “a mid-career author of fiction who has earned an extraordinarily distinguished reputation and garnered the widespread appreciation of readers.” The winner is selected by the board of the New Literary Project.
Groff made her literary debut in 2008 with the novel The Monsters of Templeton. She had a breakthrough hit in 2012 with her novel Arcadia, which she followed up three years later with Fates and Furies, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her most recent novel, Matrix, was published last September, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote, “Groff’s trademarkworthy sentences bring vivid buoyancy to a magisterial story.”
In a statement, Oates, an honorary member of the New Literary Project’s board, said, “Wherever her imagination leads, she writes with subtlety and force. For all that, there is an enthralling undercurrent of poetry in her prose, with sentences of beauty that reward careful attention.”
Groff said she was “moved and elated” to win the award.
“This award will, I hope, spur me to finish the last part of my triptych circling ideas of religion, women, climate change, and capitalism, allowing me the space to breathe, think, and slow myself down so that I can make a weirder and riskier and more difficult book than I otherwise may have been able to write under all my usual pressures,” she said.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
