Lauren Groff Receives the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

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The New Literary Project is thrilled to announce that Lauren Groff has been selected the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient. She is the award-winning author of six books of fiction including, most recently, Matrix (2021). She was a three time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She will take up short-term residency at the University of California, Berkeley and the Bay Area in October of 2022. We hope you can join us for an intimate and lively discussion between Joyce Carol Oates and Lauren Groff on Wednesday May 4th, 2022 at 4:00 pm Pacific and 7:00 pm Eastern. You can register for this event here.

“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 of my usual pressures.”

— Lauren Groff

“Lauren Groff is an audacious writer of tremendous range and depth … Wherever her imagination leads her, she writes with subtlety and force, openness and conviction.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“Productively and mesmerizingly restless, [Lauren Groff] is deeply rooted in the rough-and-tumble of contemporary life and high-flying both, an author of insatiable curiosity and energy. No wonder she seems continually self-interrogating, and at the same time strong enough to stand up against the pieties and conventionalities. She revels in risk.”

— Joseph DiPrisco

READ MORE ABOUT LAUREN GROFF

We also want to highlight, once again, the impressive work of the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists: Christopher Beha, Percival Everett, Katie Kitamura, and Jason Mott. Their work imaginatively engages with the questions that preoccupy and define us. Your engagement and attention will be rewarded by their art, which you can read more about here.

Thank you for your ongoing support and abundant good will. We’ll leave you with an invaluable insight from Lauren’s latest book:

Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.

Yours, looking into the future,

Abby, Diane, Joe, and Lindsey

New Literary Project is grateful for generous institutional support from philanthropic and corporate sponsors who, along with our many loyal individual donors, drive social change and make possible serving students, teachers, and writers across generations: Wood Family Foundation, Simpson PSB Fund, System Property, Literary Arts Emergency Fund through the Mellon Foundation, Penguin Random House, Rare Bird Books, Busby Communications, and the Miner Anderson Family Foundation.

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