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Biography
Argentine-American

Hernan Diaz

1973

Hernan Diaz is the author of Trust (2022), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about wealth, power, and narrative control in twentieth-century New York, told through four competing accounts of the same events. His debut, In the Distance (2017), was a Pulitzer finalist — making Diaz the rare writer whose first two novels were both recognised by the prize committee. Trust's formal architecture — a novel-within-a-novel-within-a-memoir-within-a-notebook — interrogates how the rich shape their own stories and, by extension, history itself.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityArgentine-American
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Hernan Diaz (b. 1973) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. He moved to the United States and earned a PhD in English and comparative literature from New York University, where he wrote a dissertation on nineteenth-century American fiction and finance. He is an associate professor at Columbia University and has edited the Spanish-language journal Revista Hispánica Moderna.

Life and Career

In the Distance (2017) — about Håkan Söderström, a Swedish immigrant in the mid-nineteenth-century American West who is separated from his brother and wanders through an increasingly surreal and violent frontier landscape — was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The novel’s revisionist Western narrative — the frontier as nightmare rather than opportunity — announced Diaz as a writer of originality and formal ambition.

Trust (2022) — structured in four parts, each offering a different version of the life of a fictional 1920s New York financier and his wife — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. The first section is a novel-within-the-novel called Bonds, about a tycoon who makes a fortune during the 1929 crash. The second is the tycoon’s own memoir, written to correct the fictional account. The third is a ghostwriter’s diary, revealing how the memoir was constructed. The fourth is the wife’s secret notebook, which demolishes every previous version. The formal architecture is a meditation on who controls the narrative — the wealthy, the powerful, the men — and whose truths are suppressed.

Major Works and Themes

Diaz writes about power and storytelling — specifically, the relationship between wealth and narrative authority. Trust asks who gets to tell the story of American capitalism and whose perspective is silenced. The novel’s formal complexity is not decorative; the four competing texts embody the novel’s argument that truth is always mediated by power.

His prose is precise, restrained, and architecturally deliberate — each of the four sections of Trust is written in a distinct style that mirrors its purported author.

Key Works

  • In the Distance (2017)
  • Trust (2022)

Collecting Diaz

In the Distance (2017, Coffee House Press) — published by a small independent press — is scarce in fine first edition condition. First editions bring $100–$300. Trust (2022, Riverhead) — the Pulitzer winner — had a larger printing; firsts bring $20–$60, with signed copies at $40–$120.