Patrick Cottrell

Patrick Cottrell
BornPatty Yumi Cottrell
1981 (age 42–43)
South Korea
OccupationWriter
NationalityAmerican
EducationSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA)
Genre
Notable worksSorry to Disrupt the Peace
Notable awardsWhiting Award

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]

Biography

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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]

Recognition

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Bibliography

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  • Cottrell, Patty Yumi (2017). Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. McSweeney's. ISBN 9781944211301.

References

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  1. ^ "Patrick Cottrell | Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences". liberalarts.du.edu. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  2. ^ Cottrell, Patty Yumi (May 18, 2017). "Patty Yumi Cottrell: 'I'm not trying to hide anything – the novel is not a memoir'". The Guardian (Interview). Interviewed by Richard Lea. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  3. ^ a b c "Patty Yumi Cottrell". The Whiting Foundation. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  4. ^ Cottrell, Patty Yumi (May 18, 2017). "Patty Yumi Cottrell: Haunted and Obsessed". The Margins (Interview). Interviewed by Brandon Shimoda. Asian American Writers Workshop. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  5. ^ "SAIC Writing Program Students and Alumni". School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Archived from the original on October 7, 2018. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  6. ^ Cottrell, Patty Yumi (November 17, 2017). "Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell". The Rumpus (Interview). Interviewed by Maria Anderson. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  7. ^ McNamara, Nathan Scott (March 14, 2017). "The Waterfall Coping Strategy: Patty Yumi Cottrell's 'Sorry to Disrupt the Peace'". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  8. ^ Cottrell, Patty Yumi (March 21, 2017). "Patty Yumi Cottrell: Writing is not Therapeutic in Any Way". LitHub (Interview). Interviewed by Claire Luchette. Retrieved May 5, 2019.
  9. ^ "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace". Publishers Weekly. November 21, 2016. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  10. ^ St. James, Liza (April 11, 2017). "The Myth of the Troubled Female in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace". The Rumpus. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  11. ^ Scholes, Lucy (May 7, 2017). "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell review – an electifying existential detective hunt". The Guardian. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  12. ^ Masad, Ilana (April 27, 2017). "'Sorry to Disrupt the Peace,' by Patty Yumi Cottrell". SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  13. ^ a b "2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards National Medalists: 21st Annual Awards". Independent Publisher. Retrieved October 6, 2017.
  14. ^ a b "2017 Discover Awards". Barnes & Noble. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  15. ^ Hertzel, Laurie (March 26, 2018). "Whiting Awards go to Weike Wang, Patty Yumi Cottrell, eight others". Star Tribune. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  16. ^ Vanderhoof, Erin (March 22, 2018). "The Crystal Ball of the Literature World Has Picked These 10 Writers to Watch This Year". Vanity Fair. Retrieved October 6, 2018.
  17. ^ Cottrell, Patrick [@pmcottrell] (January 8, 2021). "For those who don't know yet, I thought l'd put this out here: my new name is Patrick. I'm trans. My pronouns are he/they. Feeling grateful and calm" (Tweet). Retrieved August 20, 2021 – via Twitter.
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