Lesley Bannatyne

Somerville resident Lesley Bannatyne received the 2024 Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Her manuscript, Lake Song was selected by judge Deesha Philyaw, award-winning author of The Secret Life of Church Ladies. Bannatyne’s manuscript will be published by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press in fall of 2025.

“Kinder Falls is home to four generations of folks who might consider their lives to be ordinary,” Philyaw writes. “Yet in Lake Song, their beautifully told stories are at turns haunting and enchanting, overflowing with delicious details and breathtaking revelations about love, family, grief, desire, progress, regret, revenge, and every other facet of what it means to be fractured and human. This book dazzles and surprises, from line to line, page to page, and decade to decade over the course of these finely wrought characters’ lives.”

Bannatyne received the 2018 fiction prize from bosque literary journal, the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for fiction and The Ghost Story’s 2020 summer fiction prize. Her debut collection of short stories, Unaccustomed to Grace, was published in 2022 by Kallisto Gaia Press. As a freelance journalist, she covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia, and her most recent nonfiction book, Halloween Nation, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. She is a resident of Somerville, MA.

All 2024 AWP Award Winners: 2024 AWP Award Series Winners (awpwriter.org)