Berlin-Based Novelist Wins Pulitzer

Pulitzer: Jeffrey Eugenides finished his prizewinning novel with help from the DAAD. (dpa)

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides has won the Pulitzer Prize for his postmodern epic Middlesex, which traces the course of a Greek-American family from its roots in Asia Minor to a Detroit suburb, and ultimately to Berlin. The Detroit-born writer spent eight years on his celebrated second novel, completing it in the German capital with the help of a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Named for Middlesex Boulevard, a street in Grosse Point, Michigan, Middlesex tells the story of Calliope Stephanides, a girl who at 14 discovers she is genetically a hermaphrodite and decides to live as a man. By mid-life, Cal has become a U.S. cultural attaché and is stationed in Berlin, where he proceeds to track down the reason for the chromosome mutation that led to his condition.

Middlesex contains obvious parallels to Eugenides himself, whose heritage, like Cal’s, is Greek. Cal also meets and falls in love with an Asian-American woman on a Berlin subway platform; the author is married to artist Karen Yama, who is Japanese-American. And it is probably no coincidence that the novel’s protagonist ends up in Germany, where Eugenides has been living since 1999, after launching his career in New York.

“I came at the invitation of the DAAD, a German arts organization that offered me a wonderful grant,” explained the writer in a recent interview. “My wife Karen and I liked the city, and Berlin is a great place to work and to write. We have a young daughter and it’s much easier here with children than it is in New York. I also found that I liked being away from New York while I was writing Middlesex. I needed a place to hide out.” The DAAD grant, awarded through the agency’s Artists-in-Residence Program, was followed in 2000 by a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Released in the United States last fall, Middlesex will be published in German translation in May. Eugenides is scheduled to read from the novel at the American Academy in Berlin on May 13.

April 10, 2003

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