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Hernan Diaz

The Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award is an annual award given by the Tulsa Library Trust and Tulsa City-County Library. Its purpose is to give formal recognition, on behalf of the Tulsa County community, to internationally acclaimed authors who have written a distinguished body of work and made a major contribution to the field of literature and letters. The award consists of a $40,000 cash prize and an engraved crystal book.

2025 Distinguished Author Award Recipient: 
Hernan Diaz 

 Hernan Diaz, Argentine American writer, is the winner of the 2025 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in 37 languages. He was the recipient of the 2023 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”

His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. 

Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over 30 publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO, and it has been named one of the New York Times’ Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.

His stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s and elsewhere.

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others. He holds a doctorate from NYU and is also the author of the nonfiction Borges, Between History and Eternity

 

Meet Argentine American writer Hernan Diaz
2025 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author 

FREE Public Presentation and Book Signing
Thursday, Dec. 4 • 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Fifth Street and Denver Avenue

Author Presentation at Black-tie Gala
Friday, Dec. 5 • 6 p.m.
Central Library, Fifth Street and Denver Avenue

Gala tickets will be available beginning in October 2025. 

 

Search the catalog for books by Hernan Diaz. 
 

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Award Recipients