Yesterday it was announced that Lauren Groff has been awarded the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. The Prize honors a mid-career author of fiction “who has earned a distinguished reputation and the widespread praise of readers and reviewers” and grants a $50,000 award to support current and future work.

Lauren Groff was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction; her latest book, Matrix, is a protofeminist history which takes place at a 12th-century French nunnery, centering around the poet Marie de France and the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine. Oates writes,

Lauren Groff is an audacious writer of tremendous range and depth… Wherever her imagination leads, she writes with subtlety and force. For all that, there is an enthralling undercurrent of poetry in her prose, with sentences of beauty that reward careful attention. With wicked precision she eviscerates where called upon—she once said she “writes in opposition.” Even so, there is a longing to connect, a desire to fashion meaning in the torrent of our times, a sympathetic imagination always at play. “The truth does not always comfort,” she writes in one story, thereby testifying to a truth we have no choice but to live by.”

Lauren Groff and Joyce Carol Oates will be in conversation on May 4th at 4:00 pm Pacific Time; you can register here.