The DAG Foundation announced today that Michael Zapata has won the inaugural DAG Prize for literature!
The DAG Prize was founded by Alyssa and Douglas Graham, working musicians who perform together as The Grahams, founded the 3Sirens record label, and established the DAG Foundation with the intention of supporting innovative artists. The DAG Prize for Literature aims to support writing that offers significant innovation and is meant to support the writer’s second book-length prose project.
“I’m so grateful and over the moon to receive the 2025 DAG Prize for Literature, which will allow me to take artistic risks in my work,” said Michael Zapata.
Michael Zapata is the winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award in Fiction for his debut novel, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. His new work in progress, The Census Taker, follows the lives of a Quechua entomologist and her son, a census taker in Chicago, who documents disappeared people following a coup. At its heart, the novel is a love letter to Latinofuturism, indigenous scientists, and revolutionaries.
” At the end of our strange and brutal empire, I’ve been interested in how noir gives us worlds in which familiar patterns—relationships, neighborhoods, promises, politics, and memory—are no longer secure. These are postrelational worlds, not dystopian ones, worlds in which movements like the French Resistance, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and the MRI (Revolutionary Left Movement) in Chile were formed,” said Zapata. “When writing, I keep asking myself: How can we live through this sort of day-to-day unreality? Who can we really trust? What does it mean to fall in love in a world like this? In short, how the hell did it all come to this?”
The DAG Foundation also announced Ziba Rajabi as the winner of the DAG Prize for Visual Art and Elizabeth Ziman as the winner of the DAG Prize for Music.
Congratulations to Chicago’s very own Michael Zapata and all the winners of the DAG Foundation’s inagural prizes!
