Four questions to each of our prize winners. For a short interview. Here are the answers!
1. How do you feel to be a prize winner of an international book contest?
2. Is this your first prize or distinction in your writing career?
3. What was the inspiration of your book?
4. What are your writing plans for the future?
Thomas Gordon Reynolds /NOVEL UNPUBLISHED /Do You Want This Life?
1.I’ve been writing and trying to get published for a long time now so winning a prize — especially an international prize — counts as good news and as encouragement. Although not much changes in the big picture in that there is still a ways to go to my goal of publication, winning a prize like the Eyelands Book Awards comes with the message that I am not a complete idiot for trying to write and that maybe I should have more faith in myself. It boosts morale and gives me something to cite in future query letters. All said I’m pleased and motivated by the award.
2. No. Back in 2011 (thirteen years ago!) I won the Ken Klonsky prize for an unpublished novella, Break Me (Quattro Press, Toronto, 2011) under the name Tom Reynolds. Nothing since.
3.Believe it or not it was Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot that I saw at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. My book contains excerpts from a play interspersed throughout and it was written first. The absurd, comic, play needed a more serious narrative around it so the prose story came after.
4.Ah, the future! I think the future looks a lot like the past and present. Pursuing ideas, writing, trying to find outlets for reaching people (I just started writing on Medium), being rejected then trying somewhere else, entering contests (I was a finalist in the Eyelands Book Awards last year with a different manuscript — Life And What’s Wrong With It — under a shorter version of my name. So I’ll probably enter again next year). They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But that’s probably what I’ll do.
Thomas Gordon Reynolds lives on disability in small town Canada with his wife Catherine and their rescue dog Raisin. He has lived a long time, written a lot, and published a little. He refuses to let his failures stand in the way of the success he knows is just the right word choice away. He wishes everyone associated with the prize, entrants and administers, well. The writing world needs more happiness.
L. Annette Binder / NOVEL PUBLISHED /The Vanishing Sky
1.I’m incredibly thankful to be a recipient of the Eyelands International Book Award for my novel The Vanishing Sky. I couldn’t believe it when I found out the news, and I’m honored to be part of such an outstanding group of finalists. The award has a special meaning for me because I spent two summers studying in Greece after college, and I have happy memories of the hospitality and kindness of the people I met on my travels.
2. I’ve received prizes for individual short stories, which have been included in the Pushcart and O. Henry Prize anthologies, and for my short story collection, which received the Mary McCarthy Award, but this is the first prize I’ve received for a novel.
3. My novel tells the story of a mother in a small village in Germany who is trying to hold her family together during the closing months of World War Two. Her older son has come home from the eastern front suffering from a mental breakdown and her younger son has escaped from his post in the Hitler Youth and is trying to come back home to her. The story was inspired in large part by my father’s family history. My father was required to join the Hitler Youth as a boy, and family lore has it that he walked away from his post near the end of the war and tried to find his way back home. Writing the book helped me explore the complexity of my own family history, but in the end the characters in the book are very different from the people in my family.
4. I just finished a memoir, which chronicles my mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, looking to science, history, art and literature to try to find meaning and beauty even as her cognition fails. I’ve also been writing short stories and hope to have a collection completed sometime soon.
L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and immigrated to the US as a child. Her short stories appeared in the Pushcart and O. Henry Prize anthologies and have been performed on WordTheatre and Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Her story collection Rise (Sarabande) received the Mary McCarthy Prize, and her debut novel The Vanishing Sky (Bloomsbury) was a New York Times Book Review Selection for Summer. Annette studied Classics at Harvard and has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of California.
Iryna Polishchuk /CHILDREN’S BOOKS UNPUBLISHED /Letter of hope
1. My name is Iryna Polishchuk. I am an author from Ukraine. I am so happy to be a prizewinner of an international book contest. It is amazing and unbelievable in the same time! I am deeply grateful to Eyelands Book Awards and especially the judges for support in this hard for Ukrainians time.
2. It is my third prize in my writing career and I really appreciate it. My category is children’s book unpublished.
3. I write for kids because I worry about their future and the future of the world itself because it depends on today’s children dreams and inspirations. Hope my books help them to find their way in life. With a help of adventure story I show them how to be brave and kind, the importance to protect nature and care for animals, to collaborate and help each other, to fight for good and freedom, and never give up, and to see the light even in the darkest time.
4. I have already started to write my new book. It is about the war. I am sure that is necessary to document the today’s events for future generation to prevent the destructive war in the future, not only in Ukraine but also all over the world. Nothing can justify the fear in a child’s eyes. Noting can justify bombings and explosions. Nothing can justify the lost future!
Iryna Polishchuk is a children’s writer from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is a mother of two nice children and a caring teacher of English. She, like millions of Ukrainians, faced the terrible war with bombings and explosions nearby. However, she is still staying in Ukraine with her family. In her books, she continues teaching children to be brave, caring and kind, helping them to find their way in life. It is her public duty to remind that everyone deserves freedom and happiness. Iryna deals with topics such as war, pandemic, global warming and environmental disaster but more importantly, she shows children how to overcome difficulties with the help of friendship, kindness, creativity and collaboration. She is deeply grateful to the Eyelands Book Awards, for this unique opportunity to make good deeds together in this difficult time.
Anna Mantzaris / SHORT STORIES UNPUBLISHED /Machinations of the Heart and other Stories
1.I’m so appreciative. And I loved reading the bios and looking at the wonderful work of the finalists and other prize winners.
2. I am so grateful to have been a finalist for Eyelands in 2020.
3. The short stories are named after the title story, Machinations of the Heart, which was a new version of my first published short story. I used the theme from that piece of an “almost” connection people often have while I was writing and curating the rest of the stories in the collection.
4. My flash fiction collection, Occupations, was just released by Galileo Press, and I have a few projects in different phrases right now, including editing a prose chapbook, working on more short stories, and maybe (!) revising a novel draft.
Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in Ambit, The Cortland Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. Her fiction chapbook Occupations is forthcoming from Galileo Press. She teaches writing in the M.F.A. program at Bay Path University.
Amy Cleven / HISTORICAL FICTION UNPUBLISHED /26.2″
I am so excited and honored to be the unpublished Historical Fiction winner! Wow, thank you so very much. I hoped for this, worked very hard and just couldn’t believe the words when I saw my manuscript listed. My whole family was here for brunch and I was shaking when I read the email for the first time and told them. I hope this is just the start for “26.2” and the story can only be shared with more from here.
2. “26.2” also won first place in the Chanticleer International Book Awards Chaucer Early Historical Fiction contest (1 of 5). I have also won an Honorable mention and was shortlisted for another manuscript in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. I am so deeply honored to have these stories recognized. This is my first overall win in the historical fiction category. Thank you!!
3. “26.2”’s inspiration comes from both my love for running and my awe of Greece. I often tell people, we have “300” and “Troy.” We need the full retelling of the world’s first marathon. After visiting Greece and falling so in love with Athens’s history and beauty, I decided to write “26.2.” After researching and finding that so much of Athens’s history, around the time of Marathon, shaped world history, Philippides’s story just took a life of his own through my fingers, telling itself in this reimagined journey of both Athens and Marathon.
4. I would absolutely love to publish “26.2.” My goal is to get the story out to the public for all runners and historical fiction enthusiasts. My dream is for “26.2” to motivate and move people. I would also like to pursue publishing for my other three manuscripts, as well as meddle into some early childhood chapter book writing, inspired by my daughter, who is a new reader.
Amy Cleven – I am a marathon runner, author, and past traveler to Greece. My goal in writing “26.2” was to evoke personality, experience, and a vividly imaginative telling of the world’s first marathon, while also capturing the beautiful and inspiring heart that is Greece. I have won a First Prize award at the Chanticleer Book Awards, have been published in a poetry anthology, and have worked 15 years in the Nuclear Medicine field. I live in rural Wisconsin, USA with my husband and two young daughters. As a runner and writer, Greece has always inspired and awed me. I was so happy to imagine the first ever marathon through Phidippides’s words.
Jeff Fearnside / HISTORICAL FICTION PUBLISHED /Ships in the Desert
1.It feels wonderful! Writing is such a solitary business, and it’s not always easy to know how many people one’s writing is reaching and how they receive it. Winning an Eyelands Book Award is a confirmation that others see value in the work, which is encouraging. That’s really the most important thing for me about winning awards: connecting with other people. Hopefully, it brings the work to the attention of those who might not otherwise hear about it. It works the other way as well. For example, it’s brought me into contact with the good people at Eyelands: Andriana, Gregory, Patricia, and everyone else. I’ve also discovered new books by writers who were finalists or winners of different contests, and I’ve even befriended many of them on social media, where we now follow each other. In this way, community is built.
2. No, I’ve been fortunate to have won a number of awards over the course of my career. My most recent book, Ships in the Desert, alone has won four major awards so far, including, of course, an Eyelands Book Award! I feel extremely grateful for this. As I just mentioned, it puts me in touch with other people, a much wider range of people than I otherwise would be able to connect with.
3. My personal experience, for one. Kazakhstan, which is where most of Ships in the Desert is set, is important to me, as I lived there for four years and met my wife there. I’m fascinated by the commonalities and differences between cultures, and so the book is about that as well, with sections in which I look back to my time in Kazakhstan after my return to the U.S. Finally, my passion for the natural environmental and my dismay at the state of it worldwide today was a big motivation to write the book. Its large central section, which is framed around the story of a trip I took to the dying Aral Sea in Central Asia, is all about the importance of water, its proper management, and the consequences of failing to protect this life-giving natural resource. Seeing firsthand those ships grounded in a desert that had once been a sea, I understood that the reasons for the disaster were not just limited to the time and place where it happened; it’s something we’re seeing play out in various ways all over the world right now. I felt compelled to bear witness to this and, I hope, help us imagine ways to protect our natural environment, which is really protecting our own health and long-term future on this planet.
4. I have several projects in the works! I had been writing a lot of poetry while Ships in the Desert was in production, and so I now have three differently themed poetry manuscripts I’m shopping around, one that’s more formally inventive, one that’s more environmentally focused, and one that’s more culturally relevant. Obviously, I hope to find good homes for all three. In the meantime, while I’m submitting those, I’ve turned my attention back to writing fiction again. I’m about three stories away from completing another short-story collection, and I’ve also completed the first draft of a novel set in Kazakhstan. Finishing those are my two highest priorities at the moment, and I’m feeling quite excited about both.
Jeff Fearnside is the author of two full-length books and two chapbooks of prose and poetry, most recently Ships in the Desert (SFWP, 2022), which has been recognized with several honors, including a Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award. Fearnside’s individual stories, essays, and poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, The Pinch, Story, and Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (University of Washington Press, 2016). Among several competitive writing fellowships he has received are residencies at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Clermont, Kentucky, and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Other awards for his writing include a Grand Prize in the Santa Fe Writers Project’s Literary Awards Program, the Mary Mackey Short Story Prize from the National League of American Pen Women, and an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. Fearnside lived in Central Asia for four years and has taught writing and literature in Kazakhstan and at various institutions in the U.S., currently Oregon State University and the MFA in Writing Program at OSU–Cascades. More info: https://www.jeff-fearnside.com/
Nancy Burke / POETRY UNPUBLISHED /Caesura
1. Writing is, in some ways, a social activity – I consider my poems to be elements of a discussion with those writers who have formed me, and who function as aspects of what I might call, after Freud, my “ego ideal,” the interlocutors of my being. Yet in other respects, writing is an isolated activity. Having the sense that there is sharing across the globe, especially in what seems like a time of global strife and fragmentation, seems especially meaningful to me.
2. I have been grateful to have received other gestures of recognition for my writing, but I especially appreciate this support from Greece as I have such fond memories of a few summers I spent in Corfu, which this particular prize enlivens.
3. My book doesn’t have a single source of inspiration behind it. I am moved to write as a way of forming my reactions to experience. For me, this is what it means to be alive. It’s a matter of self-creation – “write or die,” as they say.
4. To keep writing! Specifically, I want to delve deeper into my poetry writing, find a home for a novel-length manuscript that has recently finished with me, and also write more songs, reviving a part of my life I’ve mostly been away from since the pandemic.
Nancy Burke is a poet, fiction writer, psychoanalyst and psychotherapy activist from Evanston IL. Her work has appeared in Story International, After Hours, American Poetry Journal, Confrontation, Whitefish Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and other literary publications as well as in psychoanalytic journals and online. Her writing has won numerous awards, including several conferred by the Illinois Arts Council, as well as by Rhino, Gradiva, Fish, Writers-Editors, Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review and other organizations and publishers. She has released two CDs of original music. Her first novel, Undergrowth (Gibson House Press), was published in 2017. She recently completed the manuscript of a second novel, The Box, for which she is currently in search of a home.
Brandi George / POETRY PUBLISHED /The Nameless
1.My book is so much about growing up in the rural United States, and I have often wondered if people who grew up in very different circumstances would still be moved by it. This tells me that, yes, it’s possible. My primary goal is to connect to others through my work, so this is a wonderful thing.
2. I have won others with my first book, although this is my first international book award.
3. My book was inspired by so much— the people I grew up with, Michigan flora and fauna, cornfields, yoga, poetry, tarot, cows, haha. All of the human and more-than-human beings around me—past and present—gave me a unique image, a vision, and a new mode of being.
4. I’m working on a series of poem-essays about figures from my dreams and visions, including Michelangelo, Elizabeth Siddal, Virginia Woolf, Salvador Dalí, William Shakespeare, and a bear.
Brandi George is the author of Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) the play in verse, Faun (Plays Inverse, 2019), and The Nameless (Kernpunkt Press, 2023). Her poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Fence, and Orion, and she has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts, the Hill House, and the Time & Place Award in France. She teaches writing at FSW in Fort Myers, Florida.
Eyelands Book Awards 