New Literary Project Names Lauren Groff Winner of 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

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Apr 19, 2022, 12:00 ET

$50,000 Prize Honors Mid-Career Author of Major Consequence

OAKLAND, Calif., April 19, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lauren Groff, award-winning author of Matrix (Riverhead) and six other audacious, mesmerizing books of fiction, has been chosen 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize recipient by the New Literary Project. The Prize annually honors a mid-career author of fiction who has earned a distinguished reputation and the widespread praise of readers and reviewers.

The Prize recognizes emerged and continually emerging fiction authors at the midpoint of a burgeoning career. Prize winners receive a $50,000 award to support current and future work. The winner of the 2022 Prize will be in brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, during October 2022.

Lauren Groff 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 lives in Gainesville, Florida.

"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 12^th 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."
—Joyce Carol Oates

The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the eminent author, an honorary member of the New Literary Project's (NLP) board of directors. NLP acknowledges her lifelong impact as a peerless teacher and writer, beloved for generations by students, writers, and readers around the world.

Join Lauren Groff and Joyce Carol Oates in a live virtual conversation on May 4th from 4 to 5:30 pm Pacific - sign up here.

See previous Prize Winners here.

More information:

Diane Del Signore

Executive
Director
[email protected]

510-919-0970

www.newliteraryproject.org

SOURCE New Literary Project