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Patrick Cottrell (born Patty Yumi Cottrell, 1981) is an American writer. He is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace and the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award. He teaches at the University of Denver.[1]
Patrick Cottrell | |
|---|---|
| Born | Patty Yumi Cottrell 1981 (age 42–43) South Korea |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) |
| Genre | |
| Notable works | Sorry to Disrupt the Peace |
| Notable awards | Whiting Award |
Cottrell was born in South Korea in 1981 and was adopted, along with two biologically unrelated younger Korean boys, into a family from the Midwestern United States.[2] He was raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee.[3]
Cottrell started his first novel in his early thirties.[4] In 2012 he received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[5] After moving from New York to Los Angeles, he completed the novel in 2016.[6] The resulting book, a "stylized contemporary noir" titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney's in 2017.[7] Cottrell has called the book "an anti-memoir".[8] It tells the story of Helen, a woman adopted from Korea at a young age, who returns to her adoptive parents' home in Milwaukee after her adoptive brother's suicide.[9] Writing for The Rumpus, Liza St. James called the book "marvelously interior" and praised the writing as "discursive and associative and gripping all at once".[10] The Guardian called the book "electrifying in its freshness"[11] and the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a strange and lovely thing".[12] Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won a National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book in the Fiction category.[13] It also won Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction.[14]
In 2018 Cottrell received the Whiting Award in fiction, which is given to promising writers in the early stages of their careers.[15][16] The selection committee said that his writing "opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity".[3]
Cottrell came out as transgender in 2021.[17]
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- 2017: Barnes & Noble Discover Award[14]
- 2017: National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book – Fiction[13]
- 2018: Whiting Award[3]
- Cottrell, Patty Yumi (2017). Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. McSweeney's. ISBN 9781944211301.
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