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      The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences.

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      The Vilcek Foundation Prizes are awarded to foreign-born individuals for extraordinary achievement in the arts and sciences.

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Home > Prizes > Prize Recipients > Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli

2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature

Location

New York, NY

Title

Author

Area(s) of Research

Fiction; nonfiction; immigration system; mass deportation

Education

Columbia University (PhD, Latin American studies and comparative literature); Columbia University (MA, Latin American studies and comparative literature); National Autonomous University of Mexico (BA, philosophy)

Country of Birth

Mexico

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Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise winner Valeria Luiselli sitting on a hanging chair in her home in New York.

Valeria Luiselli’s first book was an attempt at reclaiming her mother tongue. When she returned to Mexico City, where she was born, at 19, a lifetime away from home had calcified her Spanish. Luiselli had grown up abroad, including in South Korea and South Africa, and studied mainly in English at international schools. She wrote in Spanish to reclaim the language.

Luiselli majored in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and started writing more seriously in college. She obtained obtained a PhD from Columbia University.

Her debut, Papeles falsos, translated in English as Sidewalks, was an essay collection that spanned Venice, Mexico City, and New York. Luiselli’s second was a novel, Los ingrávidos, or Faces in the Crowd, and it also straddled international lines, taking place in Mexico City and New York.

Lost Children Archive, her first novel written in English, reimagines the American road trip novel by combining it with the tale of a marriage in decline. Underlying their trip is the narrator’s increasing concern concern for the unaccompanied minor migration crisis. “I wonder, always, about the way that younger generations will retell the story of these dark times,” she said about what inspired the book. “So at the heart of the book is a question about how we tell stories, intergenerationally, and how they form the foundational myths by which a society lives.”

Valeria Luiselli writing in a journal.

Luiselli has written five books total and devotes much of her time to activism: She and her niece teach creative writing to detained youth at a migrant center in upstate New York.

This year Luiselli won a MacArthur grant, and she is a writer in residence at Bard College. She is fascinated by sound, and is still thinking about how the work she does with refugees and detained migrants will translate to her work. For now, she is collecting materials, picking up fragments of the world.

Valeria Luiselli on a New York City sidewalk.

Awards and Accomplishments

Lost Children Archive (2019)

  • Nominated for Women’s Prize in Fiction (forthcoming)

Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

  • Winner of the American Book Award
  • Finalist in “Criticism,” National Book Critics Circle Award
  • Finalist in “Non-fiction,” Kirkus Prize
  • Lawrence S Stessin Prize, Hofstra University
  • Virginia Commonwealth University, Freshman Read of 2018
  • Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures book (2019)
  • Seattle Arts & Lectures book (2019)

The Story of My Teeth (2015)

  • Los Angeles Times Award for Best Book in Fiction
  • Montreal Blue Metropolis / Azul Prize for Best Fiction.
  • Finalist in “Fiction,” National Book Critics Circle Award
  • Selected as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.

Faces in the Crowd (2014)

  • Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
  • National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award
  • Finalist in “Fiction,” Best Translated Book Award
  • American Booksellers Association Best Debut Fiction

Sidewalks (2014)

  • Selected as one of the 10 best books of the year, New York magazine

Related Prize Recipients

2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature

Yaa Gyasi

Born in Ghana
Yaa Gyasi receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature for deeply engaging writing that unites the twin arcs of West African and African American history, and for her relentless examination of injustices of the past and present in "Homegoing" (2016).
Portrait of Yaa Gyasi
2020 Vilcek Prize in Literature

Edwidge Danticat

Born in Haiti
Edwidge Danticat receives the Vilcek Prize in Literature for dazzling prose and profound understanding of our shared human condition embodied through her genre-spanning work that explores the Haitian diaspora and other personal narratives.
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2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature

Jenny Xie

Born in China
Jenny Xie receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature for the construction of a unique poetic voice that—in its play and invention—examines the essence of perspective and selfhood through an evocative lens in "Eye Level" (2018).
Portrait of Jenny Xie

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April 5, 2020

Valeria Luiselli: “I Am Always Moving Between Genres, Identities, and Linguistic Communities”

Born in Mexico City, Valeria Luiselli grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India, among other countries. The author of ‘Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions’ and ‘Lost Children Archive’ was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2019.
Valeria Luiselli at her home in New York.
February 11, 2020

Edwidge Danticat: Storytelling as a tool for advocacy

Edwidge Danticat writes stories about “how families are unmade and remade by immigration.” As a child, she saw the power of storytelling to bring joy to her community.
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February 1, 2020

Vilcek Foundation Awards $250,000 in Literature Prizes to Immigrant Authors

Literary luminary Edwidge Danticat is announced as the recipient of the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature. Rising stars Yaa Gyasi, Valeria Luiselli, and Jenny Xie are the recipients of Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Literature
Jenny Xie sitting at a desk in front of a bookcase of literature in a light-filled room.

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