Finalist for the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize
Longlisted for the 2023 McKitterick Prize
A finalist for the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize, Patricia Grace King’s novel manuscript, Outsider Art, has also been longlisted for the 2023 McKitterick Prize.
Her shorter fiction has won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Miami University Novella Prize, the Florida Review’s Leiby Award, the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, and the Northern Writers Award in the UK. Other stories have been published in Ploughshares, Narrative, The Gettysburg Review, and Nimrod.
Her writing has been supported by a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library in London.
Raised in western North Carolina, Patricia has since lived in Spain and Guatemala, where she worked as an accompanier of refugees during the civil war and later as a language school director. She moved to the UK in 2015 and is at work on a second novel.
“‘Day of All Saints’ succeeds not only in brevity of form but is also so well written, so compassionate in portraying survival in such violent times, that it is hard to put down. So much can be said about the Guatemalan civil war... but King reminds us anew, with such lyricism, that the reader can withstand the brutality. ”
“‘Day of All Saints’ is a gripping and beautifully written tale of war and its aftermath that is, at once, profound and a page-turner. In this searing story, Patricia Grace King examines not only the human toll of Guatemala’s civil war, but also the costs of facing—and of failing to face—the ghosts that haunt us.”
“A haunted hero. His missing bride. Ghosts everywhere. In this elegantly-structured, suspenseful, and affecting novella, Patricia Grace King displays her great gifts as a writer: sharp prose, vivid setting across two cultures, and a profound empathy for the dispossessed, the forgotten, and the dreamers.”
“‘Pax Americana’ . . . deftly intertwines elements of the interpersonal with larger societal and political narratives to produce a profoundly humane reflection on marriage, politics, youth, and choices, told in an assured and compelling voice.
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“‘Rubia’ is a launchpad for Patricia King’s vibrant and poetic voice. It wonderfully captures the beauty and turmoil of Central America, the pull of exoticism, and the tribal tug of one’s own culture.”
“‘The Death of Carrie Bradshaw’ is a story full of humor, insight, an act of god, and a great cast of major and minor characters. A rarity in short fiction, it manages to feel uplifting at closure without one unearned moment. A treat.”