The Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel

The Kenneth Patchen Award is the only prize we give. We give it once a year, to one novel. We have given it many times so far, to writers most readers had not heard of, and to a few they had. We mean to keep giving it.

The word innovative gets emptied out quickly in the literary economy, so let us be plain about what we mean. We mean a novel that does something the form has not yet done, or has done so rarely that the doing of it again is still a surprise. We mean a novel whose sentences are not interchangeable with the sentences of another novel. We mean a novel that could not have been written by a workshop, by a committee, or by a machine. We mean a novel whose shape on the page is part of its argument. We mean a novel that risks failing, and is therefore capable of succeeding at something other than the merely competent.

We will not consider unrevised drafts. We will not consider novels whose innovation is purely typographic and whose interior contains nothing we have not read in essentially the same form ten times this year. We will not consider novels whose argument is exhausted by their premise. We will consider, eagerly, novels written in registers we did not expect, languages we had to look up, registers that mix high and low without flinching, and any book in which the writer is plainly trying to find out what the novel can still be.

The prize is named for Kenneth Patchen because Patchen wrote and painted and bound and published outside the institutions that would have made his life easier, and the work is still here, and the institutions mostly are not. The award is our small attempt to do for one writer a year what no one did for him. Twenty-five dollars to enter; one thousand dollars and a book in print at the end. We read every manuscript ourselves.