Patrick Cottrell

Patrick Cottrell (born in 1981) is an American writer. He is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace and the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award. His work has appeared Harper's Magazine, Granta, Ploughshares, BOMB Magazine, The White Review, McSweeney's Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Denver, where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

Early life and education 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. He was raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee. He earned his B.A. from Hamline University in 2004. In 2012, he received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The resulting book, a "stylized contemporary noir" titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney's in 2017. Cottrell has called the book "an anti-memoir". 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. 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". The Guardian called the book "electrifying in its freshness" and the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a strange and lovely thing". Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won a National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book in the Fiction category. The selection committee said that his writing "opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity".

Recognition 2017: Barnes & Noble Discover Award 2017: National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book – Fiction 2018: Whiting Award