At long last ... The Winner!

JANET MITCHELL's short story collection THE LAST OF THIS DAY’S LIGHT has won the 5th Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction!

2007-08 Contest Press Release - August 1, 2007 -
JANET MITCHELL is the winner of the 2007-08 Starcherone Fiction Prize competition. MITCHELL's manuscript, THE LAST OF THIS DAY’S LIGHT, was selected by Final Judge Lance Olsen from Starcherone Books and publication in our 2008-09 season.

About the contest: Mitchell's manuscript was one of five finalists for the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, a blind-judged contest focusing on innovative fiction, now in its fifth year, which began with a pool of 190 entrants.

The remaining finalists, announced at the beginning of last month, can now also have their identities revealed. They are:

Jai Clare – Whore to Evolution
Affinity Konar – Abecedaria
Fred Muratori – Nothing in the Dark
Terese Svoboda - Pirate Talk, or Mermalade

5 Honorable Mentions, also listed alphabetically, have also been designated:

Ari Aster, Samuel Barthowe at Your Service
Sandra Jacobs, The Before Life
Nick Mamatas, Prying Open My Third Eye
Bryson Newhart, Fibonacci Time
Tom Whalen, The Straw That Broke


About The Winner, The Last of This Day’s Light:

The generic titles of stories in this collection (“The Father Story,” “The Carpentry Story,” “The School Story,” etc.) are misleading, because in each of these 16 stories Janet Mitchell displays a distinctive, exuberant, playful, and surreal talent for language that always feels fresh and is full of insights about families and childhood, small towns and prophets, life and death. This is a debut and a talent to take seriously.

In awarding Mitchell the prize, Final Judge Lance Olsen said, "These energizing, sparklingly imaginative, at times downright visionary stories – one, for instance, by a monkey bemoaning its aging elephant colleague at the circus; another about a woman who wants her mother stuffed and made pretty when she dies; others about mysterious metalogical creatures, a brutal college rape, a patricide – often form a necklace of deceptively childlike voices moving through an avant-gothic cosmos. But they are as much, if not more, about the beauties of surprising, rhythmic prose, as well, the syllabic stuff you can taste on the tongue. This book marks the advent of an exhilarating new voice and vision in the contemporary literary jungle."


About the Author:

In May 2005, JANET MITCHELL received her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was the Bingham Scholarship recipient in her second year. Her short stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Pomona Valley Review, and have been optioned by Lifetime Television as well as by independent producers.

Janet earned her Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from the University of Southern California, where she won the coveted John Huston Award for Best Director and a prestigious Paramount Pictures Fellowship. Her award-winning short film, "How Does Anyone Get Old?", starring Mark Ruffalo and Mina Badie, was featured on IFC's "Inside the Indies" and on NBC's "Starwatch." Her educational video, "Behind Closed Doors" won a Cine Golden Eagle and is currently being used in over 250 schools nationwide.

As a freelance writer, Janet has worked for such companies as E!, Paramount Classics and Delta Airlines.

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Finally...
Thank you to all our contestants -- this year's judging was very intense and difficult largely due to the superb quality of a great many of the manuscripts. We are very happy that all of you chose to participate. Your participation has set the bar for winning this contest very high and resulted in the Starcherone Fiction Prize having become one of the most successful and frequently imitated literary contests in the United States. You are all to be thanked – for your talents and your dreams.


Ted Pelton
Executive Director
Starcherone Books
PO Box 303
Buffalo, NY
14201
716-885-2726
http://www.starcherone.com
http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com
ted@starcherone.com
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