We said that we'd pick two, but went ahead and picked four instead. Also: calling up first-time authors at home? There is just no better part of this job. Meet the winners and read excerpts: Steven Dunn’s novel Potted Meat, Dana Green’s fiction collection Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing, Amy King’s poetry collection The Missing Museum, and Kim Parko’s novel The Grotesque Child.
Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, Steven Dunn's debut novel, Potted Meat, uses a fragmented narrative to explore the fear, power, and vulnerability of storytelling, and in doing so, investigates the peculiar tensions of the body: How we seek to escape or remain embodied during repeated trauma.
Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, Dana Green’s debut collection of stories, Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing, explores how storytelling changes with each iteration; featuring mutated sheep that can herd themselves into watercolors, and a pregnant woman whose water breaks every day for nine months.
Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, Amy King's poetry collection, The Missing Museum, acts through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring: "It’s funny, the way we keep nature /outdoors like an envelope between us we mean /to open down the road."
Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, Kim Parko's novel, The Grotesque Child, explores compassion, hate, origins, beasts and babes. "I am going to ask the brightness to dim down a bit, said the animal to the grotesque child. Be careful, said the grotesque child, the brightness can be tricky."