In all the welter of blogosphere postings about the Stephen King-Shirley Hazzard dustup at the National Book Awards ceremony, insufficient attention has been paid to Carlos Eire, who won the nonfiction award for Waiting for Snow in Havana (I was one of the judges). Now the New York Times has rectified that–somewhat–by publishing an excellent interview with Eire:
For most of his adult life Carlos Eire had tried to run away from Cuba. The island was his only briefly, for 11 years, before the Cuban revolution ushered in a world of heartache in which he was separated from his parents and spent years of hardship in the United States.
“I still think it’s an evil place, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it,” said Mr. Eire, the new winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction for “Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy” (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). “The best thing I could do was to think that it was an accident I was born there.”
Read the whole thing here.