Sarah Falkner wins 7th Starcherone Prize

Sarah Falkner's Animal Sanctuary, a wild and mysterious novel of multiple characters and episodes structured around the life and career of a fictional actress and animal rights activist, is the winner of the 7th Starcherone Fiction Prize. The manuscript was selected by novelist and short story writer Stacey Levine.

Falkner, who lives in Brooklyn, will receive $1,000 and publication in Starcherone Books' 2011-12 season.

A total of 216 manuscripts had been submitted to the prize competition. Stacey Levine made the selection from among three finalist manuscripts. Two of the initial finalists withdrew from the competition. The runners-up were:

(second place) Barbara de la Cuesta, Rosamundo, a novel

(third place) Laurie Glover, This Fair Paper, This Goodly Book, a novel

In addition, Honorable Mentions are made to:

Ivan Pam Dick, Shadowtyper
Jefferson Navicky, Transparency
Bram Riddlebarger, Earplugs
Mark Wagstaff, Working for the Englishman
Kate Zambreno, Green Girl

Animal Sanctuary is Sarah Falkner’s first novel. A number of her short stories are part of City of Salt (2005: Aperture, New York), a collaborative work between herself, visual artists Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, and writer Erez Lieberman. Other stories have appeared in a couple of now-defunct magazines, Tatlin's Tower and The Styles. She has also written non-fiction features about sustainable living, ecological activism, community affairs and alternative healing practices for community monthly magazines New York Spirit and The Park Slope Reader, and on US political activism and police response for L’Offensive (Paris).

Animal Sanctuary is a challenging, readable, powerful, and mysterious novel. The story - not a single plot, but multiple, peripherally connected episodes and discourses - concerns an American actress, Kitty Dawson, who stars in two movies by a famous (and famously obscure) British director, Albert Wickwood, both having animal disaster themes. Kitty then goes on to make a great many other pictures with animal themes, and to found in the 1970s a sanctuary for big cats that rich people decide first to have as pets, then abandon. Later, Kitty's only son, Rory, raised in the animal sanctuary and as a young teen the lover of a renowned Austrian big cat trainer, becomes an installation and performance artist whose work incorporates animals & animal themes, as well as attempts to critique and get outside of institutions. Other plotlines concern a would-be revolutionary who also serves as Kitty's body double in a film in Africa, the career of a cinematographer whose specialization is "shooting" animals, and reflections on understanding the ethics of human-animal relationships. The book as a whole becomes a series of meditations on making one's own meanings from within those structures others place us in - the effort of striving for freedom, the enclosures that keep us from attaining it, and yet the beauty and necessity of such efforts. Throughout, Falkner's prose is smart, versatile, and frequently beautiful.

In commending Falkner's achievement in the novel, Stacey Levine said: "Sarah Falkner creates this work with a deeply-hued palette, incorporating specific notions of film theory, film stardom, visual art, human relationships (which in this text have no magical edge and are burdened by insanely difficult moments), and the ways in which animals are held under human control. Animal Sanctuary is an intensely focused, ambitious work with a wonderfully insistent sense of obsession. The novel brings together weirdly disparate elements in the same surprising way that life does. Returning continuously and seemingly helplessly to animals as a point of reference, Animal Sanctuary suggests that obsession may be the only way of pinning down the truth. This is a rich, interesting, multidimensional book that knows fragility and maps it."

Although the Starcherone Fiction Prize is not solely awarded to debut works, the selection of Animal Sanctuary marks the 7th consecutive time that a debut work has received the prize. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize include Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, Zachary Mason, Janet Mitchell, and Alissa Nutting. The contest has proven a springboard to future success. Most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the 2008 New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age or younger, and to see the work acclaimed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. Sara Greenslit, whose Blue of Her Body won the prize in 2005, went on to have her second novel, As if a Bird Flew By Me, win the FC2 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest.

The 8th Starcherone Fiction Prize will begin accepting submissions in October, 2010, with a final deadline of February 15, 2011. The final judge for this contest is yet to be determined.