Bard College’s Valeria Luiselli Wins the €100,000 Dublin Literary Award

Valeria Luiselli, who teaches literature and creative writing at Bard College in Avondale-on-Hudson, New York, has been awarded the €100,000 Dublin Literary Award for her novel Lost Children Archive (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

The book also won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Folio Prize. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

Publisher’s Weekly called the book “superb, powerful, eloquent. Juxtaposing rich, poetic prose with direct storytelling, and alternating narratives with photos, documents, poems, maps, and music, Lost Children Archive explores what holds a family and society together, and what pulls them apart. The novel begins with a family embarking on a road trip, and culminates in an indictment of the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process. Luiselli demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own.”

Dr. Luiselli is a native of Mexico City and is a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University.