Catherine Lacey ‘10 has won a 2016 Whiting Award for Fiction. Lacey, author of the acclaimed novel Nobody Is Ever Missing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), has two books forthcoming from FSG: a second novel and a short story collection.
The Whiting Award, which carries a prize of $50,000, comes to Lacey as she prepares to be the Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana in the fall of 2016.
In their citation, the Whiting judges wrote, “In Catherine Lacey’s accomplished and unsettling novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, a young woman drops out of her life and hitches around New Zealand. There are glimmers of what she’s left behind and an uncertainty about whether she’ll ever find a place to come to rest. Lacey is an intense, lyrical writer who uses the randomness of travel, the brief immersions in the lives of strangers, to reveal the psychology of loss and the dissolution of certainty. The sentences are as adventurous as the protagonist, capable of swerving from the whimsical to the philosophical with exquisite speed. Lacey successfully compels us into what is carefully revealed to be an unraveling mind. A great observer is at work, deft and urgent. It takes a powerful hand to make beautiful writing look so effortless.”
To read the rest of Lacey’s award citation, as well as an excerpt from Nobody Is Ever Missing, visit the Paris Review Daily.
Lacey has published work in Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly, the New York Times, Vice, AFAR, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship, and a resident at the Omi International Arts Center