2021 Dos Passos Prize Awarded to Monique Truong
Novelist and essayist Monique Truong has been named the winner of the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. The prize, awarded annually since 1980 by Longwood University in Farmville, Va., recognizes "an underappreciated writer whose work offers incisive, original commentary on American themes, experiments with form, and encompasses a range of human experiences." The winner receives an honorarium and gives a reading on Longwood's campus.
Truong was chosen from a shortlist of five finalists by the Dos Passos Prize jury, which comprised last year's winner Aleksandar Hemon, Brandon Haffner, and Kirsten Kaschock. She is the author of such bestselling novels as The Book of Salt (2003), Bitter in the Mouth (2010), and The Sweetest Fruits (2019). Previously, she won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award for The Book of Salt. She is also the co-author of the forthcoming Mai’s Áo Dài, a children’s picture book set to be published in 2023.
