The 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel went to a comedy set inside a film festival that is itself out of competition. Out of Competition (JEF Books, October 2024, 407 pages) is Lew Collins's second novel and his first book on the JEF list, the winner of the press's Patchen Award for that year.
The setting is a thinly veiled Cannes on the French Riviera. A failing Hollywood producer moves through democracy demonstrators, a kidnapping, and the festival deputy's quiet coup against his boss, while a Russian impresario's promotional shark falls from a helicopter into the bay. People who should win do not; people who should not, do.
Collins came to fiction from documentary filmmaking, with a decade of work in Hong Kong and Australia behind him before he turned to novels in New York, Rome, London, and Cannes. The festival world he satirizes here is one he has watched from inside.
More about the author is on the Lew Collins page.