Novelist Adam Johnson received the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award for The Orphan Master’s Son, the story of a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. He received the National Book Award and the Story Prize for his story collection, Fortune Smiles. His new novel, The Wayfinder, about a girl from a remote Tongan island who becomes her people’s queen, has been praised as “an epic of extraordinary abundance… modern and mythological… wondrous enough to endure” by The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times calls it “a powerful and original epic… Deadly politics, tragic romance and dangerous sea journeys keep the drama at a spirited boil.” Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, his stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Johnson was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where his interests include development of the novel, indigeneity, oral tradition, counter narrative, trauma theory and speculative fiction.
