When Junot Díaz arrived in the United States from Santo Domingo at age seven, he landed in New Jersey, that not-so-picturesque East Coast state famous for having nonetheless inspired other internationally celebrated native writers, such as Phillip Roth and Paul Auster. But back then, Díaz, now 39, who penned this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao, Vintage Español, 2007), wasn’t aware of the state’s writerly side.

Growing up in “the largest of landfills”—a smelly suburb near Perth Amboy christened with the genteel name London Terrace—he fell in love not so much with the fast-talking urban characters he would write about with disconnected compassion in his debut story collection, Drown (Negocios, Vintage Español, 1996), but with his new hometown’s libraries.

“My first moment of joy as an immigrant was discovering a library,” Díaz tells Críticas by phone from his Manhattan apartment, where he’s accompanied by his goddaughters. He adds proudly that he loves them to death; he has them doing chores. “The thing about moving to the United States, everything has a price tag,” he says. “That you could walk into a library and get a book, read it, and you could bring it back? For a very poor kid, it was just astonishing.”

Putting young people to work, a Dominican ethic he clearly adheres to, isn’t so different from a first important nudge he got from his favorite librarian, Mrs. Krau, at Madison Park Elementary. “I will never forget her. She got me interested in books and reading, and I never looked back. I always thought that I was going to discover the answers to all my questions and all my confusion and all the mystery of this country that I had moved to, inside a library.”

Despite his literary fame and prizes—such as a Eugene McDermott Award, the Guggenheim and the National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, a National Book Critics Circle Award, stories published in The New Yorker without italicized Spanish, a spot on the cover of Newsweek, and a six-figure book deal—Díaz remains tight with his big, dispersed family. When he found out he won the Pulitzer, he was visiting his mother in Ridgefield, NJ. He hung up his cell phone and told his mom (who wasn’t familiar with the award) that he had won an important prize.

Díaz grew up as one of three boys in a five-sibling, Spanish-speaking Dominican household. In an interview with a Colombian newspaper, after he was chosen as one of the Bogotá 39 (39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39), he described his background as “dominicano full.” That hip U.S.-Latino term touches on how Dominican immigrants ferociously conserve their traditions away from the island.

He claims that writing about where he came from in Oscar Wao wasn’t part of the original plan. Nor did he see it as a great opportunity to describe that madness called “the Dominican” to the entire world. For Díaz, it’s complex, like the crazier-than-fiction history of his island nation. While the book is a coming of age story about a nerdy boy from New Jersey, it’s also about the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo and the United States’ sticky history with the island.

Aside from all the historic research, when you dissect the book’s prosaic language, including all that flawless Spanish and English code-switching, you see why it took him 11 years to write it.

This vital and chaotic background is what drew him to libraries as a kid. “I mean, I came from a crazy-ass background,” says Díaz. “The library was a way for me to duck out from the madness. So every weekend when I wasn’t [expletive] around with the guys, I would walk those three miles, go to that library, read books, and then walk back.” Díaz was walking to Sayreville Public Library in Palin, NJ. And sometimes he would cut school to walk to Old Bridge Public Library for a different selection. A voracious reader of comic books and sci-fi novels, Díaz wouldn’t begin experimenting with his own writing until college.

He stayed in New Jersey after high school, working several jobs (pumping gas, washing dishes) as he studied English literature at Rutgers University where he got his first taste of world literature and the U.S. Latino and Latin American canon. He went on to get his MFA from Cornell, taught creative writing at Syracuse, and is currently senior faculty at MIT. He says he can’t live off of his books, so he’ll keep teaching. “Unless I blow up or something,” he quips.

Blow up. Into tiny little pieces? Probably not. But blow up into an international literary heavy weight, he already has. He’s been included in Best American Short Stories (um…four times), Miramax bought rights to Oscar Wao, and he recently flew to New Zealand to be on a panel with Nobel Prize winner J.M Coetzee. Post the Pulitzer, and all the critical praise, Díaz claims that his life hasn’t changed. “Being a popular writer is like being a popular pastry chef. Nobody knows who the hell you are. Literary fame is almost no fame at all. Yes, I’m still in the bookstores. I haven’t noticed a huge increase in my money. People don’t stop me on the streets. My cousin Manny Perez, he’s a Dominican actor, he’s been in stuff. When I hang out with Manny, now that’s where the real fame is. Everywhere we go. I always tell him, 'phew, thank God I do what I do.’”

Oscar Wilde, Meet Óscar Wao

Díaz spent time in Mexico working on the Wao. As the story goes, he was partying in Mexico City and made friends laugh when he purposefully pronounced Oscar Wilde’s last name in Spanish as Wao—the way a Spanish speaker might enunciate Wilde “with a potato in their mouth.” An idea was born. Most writers working in English don’t get to live double lives with their novels in the States and abroad. Díaz, on the other hand, is a bicultural writer who’s invested in how his books work out in Spanish.

Before the coming of Wao into Spanish, most folks in Spain and Latin America (excluding the D.R.), weren’t dropping Díaz’s name much in reader’s circles. But lately, they’re talking and with arms wide open. Díaz never formally studied Spanish and doesn’t write entirely in it; he says he’ll probably never write fiction in Spanish, though he reads, writes emails, and speaks in it just fine.

Perhaps Díaz isn’t troubled with the Spanish-language world’s demands on him since he got himself the perfect translator to carry him over the divide: the Cuban-born writer Achy Obejas. Her high-voltage translation, La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao, has received only praising reviews. With Obejas’s help, it seems Spanish-language book critics are finally getting the gist of Díaz’s writing.

But when his first book, Drown, was first published in English with all of its Spanish sprinklings and the first edition of the book was delivered with a note card of apology tucked inside that read: “Due to a compositor’s error…several typographical errors exist in this first edition, primarily affecting Spanish-language terms,” Díaz was troubled. As he was again when Eduardo Lago’s translation of Drown into Negocios (U.S.) or Los Boys (Spain) was nearly impossible to find in his native Dominican Republic due to poor distribution in the Caribbean.

Wao was done right. When it came to translation time, Vintage Español’s editorial director Milena Alberti-Pérez sent Díaz the first three chapters of Wao in Spanish from three anonymous translators to choose from. Díaz says he selected Obejas’s sample “because it was the most energetic, and I felt the most true to the sort of musicality and challenge of the novel.”

Then Díaz fixed a clause in the contract to assure good distribution of the Spanish translation in the Dominican Republic:Santillana got those rights. New York’s Vintage Español and its parent company, the Barcelona-based Random House Mondadori, have the rest of the territories in Spanish covered. And only one core translation, Obejas’s, is being used worldwide, though tweaked a bit to suit regional differences So which would Díaz read if had to choose? The Dominican version, he says, adding that in general, “the Spanish-version feels far more intimate. Spanish as a language is nowhere near as [expletive] insanely informal as English.”

For all his informality, Díaz has got it together. He’s a celebrated author, a diplomat in the world of letters, an activist for writers of color, a promoter of reading, an active family member, and a soon-to-be husband. The translation process seems minor in comparison. Such going back and forth comes naturally for someone like Díaz, who has existed in two languages, two worlds, his whole life. “Hey, I’m an immigrant; I know that anytime you translate you’re loosing something. But what you’re gaining is access to a new world.”

Books by Junot Díaz

La breve y maravillosa vida  de Óscar Wao. (The Brief and Wondrous Life  of Oscar Wao) Vintage en Español. (2008) ISBN 978-0-679-77669-7

Negocios. (Drown) Vintage en Español. (1997) ISBN 978-0-679-77657-4