Junot Diaz and Julie Otsuka

Junot Díaz’s new collection of stories is This Is How You Lose Her. His writing is “radiant with the hard lives of those who leave and also those who stay behind—it is a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love,” wrote Walter Mosley. “His characters explode off the page into the canon of our literature and our hearts.”

Julie Otsuka won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for The Buddha in the Attic. She “creates a voice that is hypnotic and irresistible, and renders her story with the power of the most ancient, timeless myths, the legends that crowd our dreams, and the truths we cannot bear,” wrote the judges.