Joyce Carol Oates to receive the 2024 Raymond Chandler Award

It is a great privilege for Noir in Festival to bestow this year’s award for lifetime achievement, the Raymond Chandler Award, on Joyce Carol Oates, the United States’ greatest living writer, author of some of the most important works of our times, almost all of which concern dogged, unblinking investigations into the myriad incarnations of evil in individuals and society as a whole. The festival, to be held in Milan from December 2nd to the 7th, now announces the first extraordinary personality to take part in its 34th edition, in a joint accord with La Milanesiana, founded and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi, and La nave di Teseo. Joyce Carol Oates will be Noir in Festival’s guest on December 5th and 6th and will be handed the Raymond Chandler Award on December 5th at the Teatro Franco Parenti, presented by Antonio Monda.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport in New York State. After residing in both the United States and Canada, she has lived in New Jersey since 1978. On the strength of her oeuvre of over seven-hundred works that include novels, short stories, memoirs, plays, young adult literature, essays, and poetry, every year she is considered a favorite for the Nobel Prize and has often made the shortlist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received many other prestigious awards, such as the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She taught creative writing at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and more recently at UC Berkeley and Rutgers. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Since 1963, Oates has written over a hundred books, novels and non-fiction, trying her hand at a variety of genres while cultivating her own unique style. She has addressed themes ranging from family and family roots, violence against women, innocence and its betrayal, and the destructive nature of romantic love, while condemning the corruption, racisim and sexism embedded in American culture, and has proved herself to be an essential author for our times, with her sublime artistry and relentless gaze. Evil is at the heart of her storytelling, a phenomenon so natural that it drives many of her stories and is native to her characters themselves.

On the occasion of the 2024 Raymond Chandler award, the author has declared: “It is a great honor to receive a prize first bestowed on Graham Greene, a master of the literary genre that combines mystery with a strong moral core, and the driving forces of suspense with the permanent powers of myth and the thrill of a story, which is our oldest legacy. A thriller is a vehicle and noir is the landscape, a vision of life that, for many people, is more accurate than the mirrors in which life is reflected.”

Oates’ books have been published in Italian over her entire career. Most recently, the publishing house La nave di Teseo has brought out Oates’ novels under the titles Ho fatto la spia (2020, My Life As a Rat, 2019), Una brava ragazza (2020, A Fair Maiden, 2010), La figlia dello straniero (2020, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, 2007), Pericoli di un viaggio nel tempo (2021, Hazards of Time Travel, 2018), Blonde (2021, Blonde, 2000), La notte, il sonno, la morte e le stelle (2021, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, 2020), Sorella, mio unico amore (2022, My Sister, My Love, 2008), L’altra te (2022, The (Other) You, 2021), Respira (2022, Breathe, 2021), Babysitter (2023, Babysitter, 2022), Dammi il tuo cuore (2023, Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2011), La madre che mi manca (2024, Missing Mom, 2005) and, under the imprint La Tartaruga, the short-story collection entitled Circostanze attenuanti (2024, Extenuating Circumstances: Stories of Crime and Suspect, 2022), among others. In November, La nave di Teseo will publish her latest, as Il macellaio (Butcher, 2024). There have been 25 film adaptations of Oates’ books, between short films and features, from 1978 to 2022. They include the 2022 film Blonde (2022), by Andrew Dominik, about the life of Marylin Monroe and nominated for an Oscar®, as well as Foxfire (1996), by Annette Haywood-Carter, also Angelina Jolie’s screen debut, and the French remake by Laurent Cantet in 2012, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.