Monique Truong has won the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Longwood University announced in a news release.
Truong, a Vietnam native who moved to the U.S. when she was 6, is known for her novels The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010.
“Truong’s work rewards slow reading,” Kirsten Kaschock, one of the prize jurors, said. “Her plots do not surge, they unfold—and the characters within them slowly take shape, accruing character from multiple gestures and observations rather than reactivity. In her books, I felt entrusted with lives lived. The unsaid and the unknown make their presences felt alongside her meticulously researched world construction, and the result is a richness that can’t be spoken of only by addressing what Truong does.”
In a 2019 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Truong discussed the inspiration for her novels.
“I don’t think that writers choose their subjects,” she said. “I think they choose us. I think they step out of history books, off the sidewalk, or from a near future, and they say, ‘Hey, fool, you’ll be writing this one!’”
The annual Dos Passos Prize, which honors “an extremely talented but underappreciated American writer,” was established in 1980. Past recipients include E. Annie Proulx, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Karen Tei Yamashita.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
