2014 Judge

Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of three short story collections and six novels, most recently We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which received the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award and has been shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her books’ honors and awards include two New York Times Notable Books, the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and the World Fantasy Award.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Fowler “is a trustworthy guide through many complex territories: the historical allure and dicey ethics of experimental psychology, not to mention academic families and the college towns of Bloomington and Davis…this is a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self” (New York Times Book Review).