Kenneth Patchen Award
for the Innovative Novel
Please see the bottom of the page for details about next year’s Patchen Award contest.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Journal of Experimental Fiction announces 2015 Winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award Winner for the Innovative Novel!
GENEVA, IL—November 22, 2014—The 2015 winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel is Kate Horsley, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for her novel Between the Legs.
In his encomium for the award, contest judge James Chapman stated,
I have no idea what Kenneth Patchen would say about this book, but my god. The actual reason novels need to be experimental is because our lives are desperately experimental. The bright book of life is at least as fragmentary and unstructured as you can bear, and any shape you bring to it may turn out to be the shape of your pain. Kate Horsley knows all about that stuff, and has written a novel that reads fluently and is full of unspoken knowing about these specific lives–yet it isn’t a conventional book at all, because she has a voice that transcends her characters. She sounds like a bitter ancient angel who sculpts emotions for a living and knows so deeply well how these lives always end up that she can’t even protect herself from the knowing. I admire this book hugely (and it kills me that I didn’t write it myself).
Between the Legs was chosen as the winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel over many other worthy candidates for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written as well as for its deep sympathy for the human condition, both qualities epitomized by Kenneth Patchen himself.
After a hiatus, the Kenneth Patchen Award for writing was revived in 2010. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2011, the Award was reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and will honor the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.
Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.
ABOUT JEF
Founded in 1986, The Journal of Experimental Fiction is the English language’s pre-eminent source for innovative fiction.
Links: http://www.experimentalfiction.com. Contact: Eckhard Gerdes, editor & publisher.
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