Announcing the Winner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction
Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction: The Moveables by Sarah Yahm. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Mark Dunn (We Five, Ella Minnow Pea), Julie Ann Stewart (Water and Blood), and Alan Grostephan (The Banana Wars), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction.
Yahm’s debut, The Moveables chronicles the decline of a tight-knit, eccentric family after the matriarch, Louise, is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease. In order to spare her husband Leon and her daughter Lydia from her messy decline, Louise makes the simultaneously selfish and altruistic decision to leave her family and die on her own terms. The epic collapse of their once-solid foundation forces the Rosenberg family to discover who they are in the world without each other.
Grostephan says of the manuscript, “The Moveables spans forty years and follows the lives of a family, intimately depicting each character as complex, flawed, and beautifully human despite and because of the darkness that surrounds them. This is a smart, darkly funny, and fascinating novel about how people move through time and space, brought together by love and affection and torn apart by loss.”
Sarah Yahm has worked as an educator, oral historian, documentarian, and writer. She has a Master’s degree in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz and in Public Humanities from Brown University, and has taught at colleges and universities around the country. Her work has appeared in Slate, The Bellevue Literary Review, and on NPR and affiliates.
Yahm said of winning the prize: “I came up with the idea for The Moveables years before I started writing it—how would news of an inherited genetic illness affect the three members of a tight-knit family unit? But while nursing a newborn and grappling with the limitations caused by my own chronic illness, this abstract idea took on a personal urgency and I found myself in conversation with living, breathing characters as I changed diapers, went to doctor’s appointments, and lay awake worrying in the middle of the night. I’m beyond thrilled that Dzanc is bringing The Moveables into the world as part of their rich collection of books about messy, complicated, real women, and I hope readers also find companionship and comfort in this warm, neurotic, irreverent family.”
The Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing. Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization not only committed to producing quality literary works but providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program, and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors. For more information, please visit dzancbooks.org