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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JEF Books announces 2023 Winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award Winner for the Innovative Novel!
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL—March 2, 2024—The 2023 winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel is
Lew Collins, of Cannes, France, for his novel Out of Competition.
Lew Collins has written three novels and one work of non-fiction and made many films, living and working in several places around the world. His first novel Uncorrected Proof (2008 ElephantEars Press) is a postmodern satire of writing and publishing. An award-winning filmmaker, he has written, directed and produced films in Asia and Australia. Lew Collins lives and writes in France.
About the novel:
"Demonstrators protest for democracy at the Rennes-Sur-Mer annual film festival, kidnapping a Hollywood producer while a Russian impresario’s shark falls from a helicopter out in the bay, and the festival’s deputy usurps his boss’s position. Chaos headlines a year to forget or the one to remember. People who should win don’t. Those who shouldn’t do. Nobody knows anything, everyone off the air, out to lunch, or simply Out of Competition."
Out of Competition 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 was revived in 2012. 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 2012, the Award was reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and it honors 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 benchmarks for beats, postmodernists and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers 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. Contact: Eckhard Gerdes, editor & publisher, egerdes@experimentalfiction.com. Site: www.experimentalfiction.com
PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE KENNETH PATCHEN AWARD FOR THE INNOVATIVE NOVEL
2022 – Ann Z. Leventhal – The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir
2021 – Dennis Vanderspek – A Is for Everyone
2020 – Cal Massey -- (Own Little Worlds)
2019 – Genelle Chaconas – Plague City
2018 – Patrick Keller – Those Brave As the Skate Is
2017 – Richard Strauss – The Skrat Prize Memorial Anthology
2016 – Charles Hood – Mouth
2015 – Kate Horsley – Between the Legs
2014 – Bob Sawatzki – Return to Circa ‘96
2013 – Moore Bowen – Oppression for the Heaven of It
2012 – Carolyn Chun – How to Break Article Noun