Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Published in 2007, the novel follows Oscar de León, a Dominican-American young man in New Jersey who dreams of becoming a science-fiction and fantasy writer. It also traces his family's history in the Dominican Republic and the trauma associated with the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.
The narrator, Yunior, blends English, Spanish, slang, footnotes, comic-book references, and speculative-fiction language. The novel's recurring idea of fukú, a curse associated with the Caribbean, connects personal misfortune with the region's history and with the family's attempt to understand suffering across generations.
Díaz's novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. It also received the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book's title includes “wondrous,” not “wonderful,” and its narrative is broader than Oscar's individual life: it is also a family saga and a historical account.