Writer Lars Horn has won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for their essay collection, Voice of the Fish, the publisher announced on Wednesday.
“Taking water and aquatic lifeforms as the thematic and formal starting point, Voice of the Fish combines personal essay, mythology, theology, and marine history to explore questions of the body—particularly, gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness—as well as those of faith, the arts, and whiteness,” Graywolf said.
Horn, who lives in Montreal and Miami, wrote about their connection to reading and writing in a 2019 essay for Kenyon Review. “I believe literature alters the texture of things—how we are, or do, or see,” they wrote. “Personally, I read as a means of returning to the world, to myself—differently.”
Horn said they were grateful to win the award.
“Living in a body I have difficulty recognizing as my own, a body I somehow perceive at disjoint from myself, I never thought that I might find some rough peace in these limbs,” they said. “I definitely never thought that I would be able to write of myself—honestly, openly. To be seen.”
Minneapolis-based Graywolf will publish Voice of the Fish, though no publication date has been announced. Previous winners of the independent publisher’s nonfiction prize have included Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss’ Notes From No Man’s Land, and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
