Groff Wins Oates Prize

Lauren Groff is the winner of the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. The award honors “mid-career authors in fiction,” and the winner receives a $50,000 prize from the New Literary Project.

Oates says of Groff:

Lauren Groff is an audacious writer of tremendous range and depth: most recently, treating modern American marriage in her novel Fates and Furies, exploring contemporary paradoxes and mysteries through the continually surprising stories in Florida, and then fleshing out life in a protofeminist 12th Century French abbey in Matrix. 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. With wicked precision she eviscerates where called upon—she once said she “writes in opposition.” Even so, there is a longing to connect, a desire to fashion meaning in the torrent of our times, a sympathetic imagination always at play. “The truth does not always comfort,” she writes in one story, thereby testifying to a truth we have no choice but to live by.

Groff will be in residence at the University of California, Berkeley in October 2022. For more information about the prize, see the New Literary Project website.

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