Event
Event
Alice Winn winner of the 2024 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for In Memoriam, gives a reading and participates in a moderated Q&A session about the writing and publishing of her book on November 19, 2024 at 7 p.m.
In Memoriam tells a tale of forbidden love between two young men as it follows them from their sheltered English boarding school to the horrors of the Western front in World War I.
The event is free and open to all and will be held in person but will also be live streamed through Zoom. The in-person location will be James Branch Cabell Library, Room 303, 901 Park Ave., Richmond, Va. 23219. Parking is available for a fee in the West Broad Street, West Main Street and West Cary Street parking decks.
Registration
About the Author
Winn grew up in Paris and was educated in the United Kingdom. She has a degree in English literature from Oxford University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Among its honors, In Memoriam received the 2023 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and won the British Book Award for Debut Fiction. It was named a GMA Buzz Pick and a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR and The Washington Post. In Memoriam also was longlisted for the Center for Fiction Debut Novel prize.
The New York Times Book Review writes that in In Memoriam, Winn’s “exquisite pacing lives in her syntax as much as her plot, giving vim and vigor to every line.” Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, calls the novel “magnificent — dazzling and wrenching, witty and wildly romantic, with echoes of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and ‘Atonement.’ I loved it.”
Sponsors
The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award is presented on behalf of VCU’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Sponsors include: the James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Libraries, the Friends of VCU Libraries, the VCU Department of English and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences.
2024 Winner
Twenty Third Annual Award
In Memoriam (Penguin Random House)
By Alice Winn
ABOUT IN MEMORIAM FROM THE PUBLISHERS WEBSITE
GMA BUZZ PICK
INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER AND AWARD WINNER
A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I. “Will live in your mind long after you’ve closed the final pages.” —Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR
“In Memoriam is the story of a great tragedy, but it is also a moving portrait of young love.”—The New York Times
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle–an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood–without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt’s family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt’s horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.
Judges: The 2023 Winner Tess Gunty; Students from the VCU MFA in Creative Writing Program; and the Cabell First Novelist Award Committee
Finalists: Jinwoo Chong for Flux (Melville House) and Gerardo Sámano Córdova for Monstrilio (Zando)