The Acclaim in Spain Falls on Auster

Paul Auster, a New Jersey-born author who first gained widespread prominence for writing The New York Trilogy, a sequence of unconventional, existential, postmodern detective novels (City of Glass [1985], Ghosts [1986], and The Locked Room [1986]), has won Spain’s 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters. Víctor García de la Concha, president of the prize organizers’ committee, is quoted by the Associated Press as saying that Auster was selected because of “the literary renewal he has carried out by uniting the best of North American and European traditions. With his exploration of new areas of reality, Auster has been able to attract young readers by giving an aesthetically valuable testimony of the individual and collective problems of our times.” Although Auster, now 59 years old, began by tackling crime fiction (in fact his first novel, written under the pseudonym “Paul Benjamin,” was Squeeze Play [1982], a detective story), he has since penned poetry, essays, screenplays, memoirs, and a variety of non-genre novels, the most recent of which was The Brooklyn Follies (2005).