Hernan Diaz will be appearing with local author and PRoB contributor Adriana Ramirez at the Carnegie Lecture Hall on October 14th, 2026 in a reading hosted by PRoB media partner White Whale Bookstore.
The future, as Hernan Diaz sees it, is not necessarily an unbroken slide toward disaster. “The present is harsh,” he says, matter-of-factly, “and the past has been harsh.” Human beings, he adds, “are not generous as a species”. The institutions meant to curb that selfishness are the guardrails “against ourselves”, and they are already being eroded.
This is the terrain of Ply, his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust. It is set centuries from now, in a city where the state has been dismantled, public services are gone and electricity is scarce. Its young protagonist is a “pincher”, stealing power from the grid to sell on the black market and to keep an underground music scene alive.
It is a leap forward from his first two novels, though Diaz now sees the three books as an accidental sequence. In the Distance (2017), a novel of a Swedish immigrant’s lonely passage through the nineteenth-century American West, was about “the birth of this country that I have made my own”. Trust (2022), with its Wall Street titan and competing accounts of his life, charted the nation’s expansion into “a financial empire”. And Ply, he says, became a question of “what would happen after this empire sort of dissolves or mutates”.
Born in Buenos Aires, Diaz spent his formative childhood years in Sweden, then returned to Argentina. He later moved to London for a master’s degree and came to New York, where he has now lived for almost three decades. He never attended an MFA or a writing workshop. “Books and authors were my teachers,” he says. “That’s how I learned.”
Those teachers were Astrid Lindgren and Tintin, followed by Julio Cortázar, Borges and Kafka, writers who gave him not simply stories but “the adventurousness of form”. That attraction to risk, disruption and difficult pleasure is all over Ply. It appears in the novel’s shifts from an adventure story to philosophical speculation; in its physical, repetitive punk music; and in Diaz’s own definition of punk as “a sense of provocation married to a very profound sense of care”.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Diaz spoke about the books that raised him, the thinking behind Ply, what a year and a half among neuroscientists changed for him, and why he refuses to write for prizes or the market.
Q. You grew up between Buenos Aires and Sweden. What are your earliest memories of reading?
Hernan Diaz: They are completely in Swedish. That is where I went to daycare and grade school, so all those memories are in Swedish. I go back every time I can. I spent the whole month there this summer.
The first proper books I read, books with no pictures or very few pictures, were by Astrid Lindgren. She is a very important Swedish author for young people. Her most famous book here is probably Pippi Longstocking, but she has a very big body of work.
I was also very into graphic novels, especially Tintin. They are a constant source of inspiration, in terms of artistry and mastery and storytelling and craft. Obviously, those books are rather complicated ideologically today, and very racist, a product of their time. But the artistry is still there.
Then, in my pre-pubescent years, I started reading Julio Cortázar, Borges and Franz Kafka. Those were the three writers who really opened up for me the experience of form. More than plot, more than characters, more than whatever propulsiveness a story can have, they showed me the adventurousness of form. It was almost 40 years ago now, and it is still something I strive for all the time.
Q. You knew you wanted a life in books, but there were no creative-writing programmes around you. How did you become a writer?
Diaz: I always knew that I wanted to make a living out of books. There were no creative-writing programmes or anything like that back then in South America, so I became an academic. I also fell in love with the English language. As soon as I could, I moved to England. I lived in London for a while and did my master’s there, and then I came to New York. It is going to be 30 years soon, unbelievably.
I never took creative-writing classes. I never attended an MFA or a workshop. My teachers were my books. That is how I learned, and of course through trial and error, putting in thousands of hours of writing. I did it in a very unsupervised fashion and had very few readers for my experiments.
Being invested in academia for about three decades gave me a very broad and profound view of the literary past. I was exposed to a large portion of what I would, somewhat embarrassingly, call the Western canon, mostly literature of South America, North America and Europe. It also exposed me to remote corners of that tradition, things a more average reader would not come across. I have this vast literary archive in my mind.
I was also very invested in philosophy and theory. You are exposed there to prose that moves at a different velocity. It is slower, more demanding of attention and patience. Sometimes the rewards are very delayed. I love to be carried away by narrative, but I also love to find a certain degree of resistance in language, a resistance intellectually, a certain struggle. I think that is a lovely thing.
Q. Tell me about your relationship to success.
Diaz: I have been published relatively recently. The notion that my books are being read by people beyond my friends is still new to me. I was just happy to finally have my books out in the world and be able to engage with readers, with a community of book lovers. That was everything. The Pulitzer and everything beyond it has been wonderful, and I do not take any of it for granted, because it came late and after so much hard work.
There is pressure after Trust, of course. But I have to summon up the punk spirit I was trying to describe. I do not do this for awards or book advances or fancy exposure. I do it because I take it very seriously. I do it because I love the beauty of a well-made sentence. I am amazed at how language works, at what can be done with it, at how polysemic and strange and reality-defying meaning itself can be. That is what keeps me in it, and nothing else.
Q. You now see a connection between your three novels. What is it?
Diaz: In the Distance is an exploration of solitude and disorientation, but also of the birth of this country that I have made my own, the United States. Trust, unintentionally, draws a line from there. If In the Distance is about the birth of this country, Trust is the expansion of this country into an empire, a financial empire.
Then Ply, again against my will, turned out to be about what would happen after this empire dissolves or mutates. What is in store for us as a country? I have always been very invested in the literary history of the United States, and I have found myself writing about the United States in all three novels. It is the common character that wanders from one book to the next.
Q. Why did technology, and the future, become the right territory for Ply?
Diaz: My initial intent, which then mutated, was to write about technology. It is an integral part of understanding this country, at least since the Industrial Revolution. The future is the natural habitat of technology. That is what we associate most immediately with scientific advancement: that it leads to a future, or the promise of one.
I am also interested in genre. With In the Distance, I was trying to question the Western without writing a Western. With Trust, I was thinking about novels of manners and the long tradition of American novels about class, trying to make an intervention in that particular canon.
With Ply, I was frustrated as a reader to find that the representation of technology in literature has been, to some extent, monopolised by science fiction, a genre I am not particularly drawn to. That was a good thing. It allowed me to go into what is presumed to be that territory, the marriage between fiction and science, and try to think about storytelling and technology in a new way.
Q. The world of the novel is brutal, but it is not only bleak.
Diaz: The present is harsh. Has the past been kind? We are not generous as a species. That is why we have all these institutions, to compensate for our innate selfishness. We built all these guardrails against ourselves. They have not always existed. They have been here for a short time, and now they are going away.
I wanted a certain degree of complexity in this imagined future. There are new forms of sociability, new forms of family, new economies. Art flourishes. Everyday life has been liberated. Interpersonal relationships are no longer commodified. So, is it harsh? Yes. But is it also liberated and full of promise? Yes.
Q. Electricity has an almost bodily presence in Ply. How did that come to be?
Diaz: A great deal of it was plot-driven. I had this really plucky, resourceful, self-made survivor, and then this older, sophisticated, very erudite, probably Newton-grade genius. I needed a way to bring these two people together. Scarcity seemed like a good bridge, and electricity would be needed by both of them for different reasons.
It also shows the scarcity of that world as a whole. You can survive by having a plot of land and planting vegetables, or relying on other people for aid. But there are commodities you simply cannot make on your own. Electricity is one of them.
It stands a little as a synecdoche for the whole project of modernity. If you had to think of one thing that sums it all up, and makes everything possible today, it would be electricity, and water of course. But water has always been there, while harnessing electricity is very recent in human history.
When you think of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to give it to humans, fire is the emblem of technology. It is the tool that makes all the others possible. I think today the equivalent of fire is electricity.
Q. Why is the underground music scene so important to the book?
Diaz: It is a specific kind of music: very loud, repetitive, intense, demanding on the body. It is very tactile. If you have experienced music like that live, it makes you aware of space. You feel the physical space around you, and you feel touched by an intangible force.
The book is very concerned with the physical definition of space, especially the space between two people. What is that space? It is never empty. How are we brought together by the very thing that supposedly brings us apart? This kind of music gives you an experience of space that is unavailable in any other way.
Historically, this kind of scene flourishes in urban settings that have been undergoing deep crises: New York in the late 1970s, London, Manchester, Berlin and Germany more generally. These were depressed places, where urban infrastructure and social services were collapsing. And what happened miraculously was that new forms of community emerged, from squatters to bands, art and performance spaces, and the sub-economies that came with them.
There is enormous pain in those collapses, but more genuine and less alienated forms of community can also emerge. The music created in those conditions was made under severe constraints. People had basic, rundown, cheap gear. They had very little education, were poor, had maybe shitty jobs on the side and no time. Yet they made art that was transcendent and is still alive. I was attracted to setting this enormous, immensely sophisticated invention in a very DIY, low-fi, crumbling and precarious music scene.
Q. You call that spirit punk. What does punk mean to you?
Diaz: There is a historical definition, which is contained and over. It happened in the mid-1970s, had a second iteration with post-punk and went into the early or mid-1980s. If you stretch it at both ends, you get maybe 10 years.
But there is a wider conception that is current and very much alive. It has to do with a sense of provocation married to a very profound sense of care. It affects people’s bodies, not only intellectually. It is a call for presence. I think the loudness has to do with waking up and being here.
What at first glance is a very aggressive sign is ultimately very gentle. It has to do with community and care. It also has to do with self-reliance, with believing in what you are doing and not giving a fuck about market constraints and opinions and noise, staying true to whatever emotional truth you find in your work.
The danger of that is solipsism, so the communal aspect is important. It does not have to do with safety pins, mohawks, combat boots and ripped T-shirts. That is costume. It has more to do with a way of inhabiting the world, with a lack of cynicism, and with being earnest and caring.
Q. You spent a year and a half in residency at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, in conversation with neuroscientists. What did those discussions give you?
Diaz: They changed my perception of consciousness, selfhood, mind and even body. I come from a tradition of mostly idealism that goes all the way back to Socrates, a tradition predicated on the distinction between mind and body, noumena and phenomena, all kinds of dualisms.
That school of thought has informed how all of us think of ourselves, whether we know it or not. There is the world of tangible objects and forces that we can measure, and then a world that exists only ideally, in ether, inaccessible through the senses or experience, which is supposedly the truest world of all.
I have a very hard time now thinking that this could be true, or more than a superstition. The world of matter is complex enough, unknown and mysterious enough, to be the reservoir of all the explanations that we need, even though we do not have them yet. Who we are, how we think, why we think, the nature of time, why there is something rather than nothing: the answers are not in ether. They are here. They are within our reach. They are made of stuff.
That does not make them simpler. It is much easier to say that truth resides in an ideal, surreal world and then you are done. I find it much more beautiful to say that selfhood, consciousness and even time emerge from extremely complex interactions of particles and forces that we do not understand yet. Maybe we will one day, maybe not. But it is definitely something in nature. That enhances us as human beings rather than demoting us. We are beautifully irrelevant within this larger scheme of things.
Q. What kind of experience do you hope Ply gives readers?
Diaz: I hope it will be an intellectual adventure. I hope readers find beauty in the world depicted, and in these fragile but resilient characters trying to find themselves and find one another. I hope readers find part of themselves in them. And I hope they see that beyond the inevitable pain that comes with great historical changes, there is a great deal of hope. I think we will be able to imagine a better future for ourselves.
