N. Scott Momaday | |
|---|---|
 Momaday receiving the National Medal of Arts from George W. Bush in 2007 | |
| Born | Navarre Scott Mammedaty February 27, 1934 Lawton, Oklahoma |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Kiowa |
| Alma mater | University of New Mexico (B.A.) Stanford University (Ph.D.) |
| Genre | Fiction, Poetry |
| Literary movement | Native American Renaissance |
| Notable works | House Made of Dawn (1968) |
Navarre Scott Momaday (born February 27, 1934) is a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet.
Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma. He is a Native American of the Kiowa people. His early life and education happened on Navajo, Apache, and Jemez Pueblo reservations. He went to college at the University of New Mexico. He got his masters and doctoral degrees at Stanford University.[1]
In 1969 his first novel, House Made of Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] He receved the National Medal of Arts in November 2007.[3] In 2019 he was given the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. That award said, "Momaday speaks for the Earth, [seeing] the natural world as a sacred space and [telling] us that humans are a part of, not apart from that world."[4]
Momaday's writing often mixes up fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. In The Way to Rainy Mountain, he uses "Kiowa tribal and private stories, history and descriptions of the land, and drawings."[5]
His books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Japanese, and Spanish.[4]
