Englishman Louis de Bernières is the Commonwealth Prize winning author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and Dominican-American Junot Díaz won a Pulitzer Prize for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Apart from their success, and the fact that they’re coming to SILF, what do the authors have in common? We think the connections we came up with are worth at least a B+.

The keywords listed alongside the short story version of 'Oscar Wao' published in The New Yorker are: "Dominican Republic; Immigrants; Teen-agers; Adolescence; Fat People; Paterson, New Jersey; and Comic Books."

We asked Junot Díaz what he thought about the words as an introduction to his writing. “Oh my god, hilarious. These are the kind of bullion key words that always so humourously disfigure a work of art.”

Díaz offers some alternatives that are at least a little less misleading than 'fat people'. “I would be like, nerds. I would be like, families. I would be like, dictatorships. I would say love, and then I would say sexual violence. And then throw in the Caribbean, and I think you’ll at least have a slightly – as a friend of mine said, that’s a description that you can arrest somebody on.”

The first word Díaz offers, 'nerds', is the one that would stand out in a literary line up. In the world of serious fiction, few things are as exotic, as untouchable, as the outsider art of sci-fi and fantasy, two of Oscar Wao’s obsessions (the third is less unusual – the women he can’t get).

In Louis de Bernières' latest book of stories, Notwithstanding: English Village Stories, he also finds exotic subject matter right in front of him. “The book was written over a period of about 20 years after a French friend of mine pointed out that he thought that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe,” he says. “Up until then I’d always thought that the most interesting stories happened abroad somehow.”

Then de Bernières recalled the retired military general in his home town who had also retired from wearing clothes. “I lived in a village which was just full of crazy people. And they’re all dead now and I wanted them remembered.”