Pulitzer Prize-winning author and creative writing professor Adam Johnson has spent decades chasing stories that slip through the cracks. “Whenever there’s a missing story, it’s something I can’t bear. It grates at me. It feels like an injustice,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s 2012 historical fiction novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 and highlighted the unseen lives of North Korean citizens. The Washington Post called it “an audacious act of imagination” that takes “implausible fact and turns it into entirely believable fiction.” The Wall Street Journal named it “the single best work of fiction published in 2012.” 

More than a decade later, Johnson is now focusing on another world shaped by memory and erasure. His newest book, “The Wayfinder,” is set in pre-colonial Polynesian islands and will be released on Oct. 14. In the novel, Johnson envisions a time before colonial disruption and an “escape from the complexities of modern life.”

However, Johnson didn’t always plan to be a fiction writer. As an undergraduate at Arizona State University, he majored in journalism. Johnson’s days were full of fieldwork, interviews and stressful deadlines. “I loved going out into the field, not knowing what I was going to write about or what the story would be, until I met people,” Johnson said. 

However, as a journalist, he realized there were truths that couldn’t be expressed or proven through facts alone. “It turned out those stories weren’t stories I could ever really fill in, because the people were gone,” he said.

“I’ve personally felt that I could tell bigger, more important stories through relinquishing facts for human truth,” Johnson said. 

Johnson’s conviction stems from his childhood, when he was entranced by the vivid tales shared by his family, some real and others completely fictional. “My uncle would tell a story about the town that was very real, and then my father would tell a completely mythical story about a gigantic catfish in the lake that was 10 feet long,” he said. “No one ever asked, ‘Was that real?’ It was like you could cast a spell upon someone.”

Growing up surrounded by rich stories made the incomplete ones even more significant to Johnson. His impulse to write was fueled by not just a love of storytelling but the need to confront the injustice surrounding overlooked lives and histories. 

So, Johnson pivoted. In 1996, he earned a master of arts and master of fine arts in English and creative writing from McNeese State University, adding a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University in 2000. 

Johnson’s lifelong musings on the nature of truth are reflected throughout his novels, especially “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Set in North Korea under the rule of Kim Jong-Il, the novel follows Jun-do (John Doe), an orphan raised to serve the country, as he navigates a world where truth is constantly manipulated. 

In a novel that captures both the absurdity and the horror of life in North Korea, Johnson also draws from his own time spent in the country to bring the story to life.

After spending years immersing himself in the lives of those in North Korea, Johnson began working on “The Wayfinder.” This time, Johnson focuses on a different but equally complex story. Though the setting has shifted, his motivation to bring light to untold stories remains. 

Publisher Sean McDonald called “The Wayfinder” “even more spectacular, immersive and mind-blowing” than Johnson’s previous work.

Johnson was partly drawn to the Polynesian islands because of a personal search for his own family’s origin. His grandmother was Lakota and lived her whole life on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. However, having never met his grandmother, he couldn’t help but wonder what she was like and why his family no longer was able to speak Lakota.

Johnson, left with the unanswered questions about his heritage, was particularly drawn to cultures where storytelling preserved history. Johnson went to New Zealand and was welcomed by the Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of the island. He spent time with storytellers, listening to and learning about the thousands of years of history captured in Maori oral storytelling.

The comparison between Maori storytelling and his own missing lineage inspired “The Wayfinder,” which takes place in a world built on unbroken traditions. The novel became a way for him to reclaim ancestral heritage — if not from his own family, then from a broader human history of survival, navigation and identity. 

Over time, he realized that writing was not just a passion but a responsibility. “I started writing about myself and my own life, feeling like a lonely kid, feeling like an outsider,” he said. “But as I grew up and had a family, I had bigger things to write about.”

“If you are a good storyteller, you kind of have a duty to help other people tell important stories,” Johnson said.