Black Balloon Announces Book Prize Winner
Black Balloon Publishing, an imprint of the newly established Catapult, has announced Tegan Nia Swanson as the winner of the 2014 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for her debut novel, Things We Found When the Water Went Down. The annual award includes a prize of $5,000 and publication for a novel or short story collection.
The editors selected Swanson’s book from more than 1,500 submissions. “Tegan’s novel is organized as a series of artifacts,” says Black Balloon associate editor Julie Buntin. “Reading Things We Found When the Water Went Down is a process of discovery, of excavation, and it’s precisely this narrative ambition that makes the book such a perfect fit for this prize. I had the sense while turning the pages that I was in the presence of something new.”
Swanson is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, where she was the 2011 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Bellingham Review, and Connu, and in the Black Earth Institute’s About Place Journal. She won the 2013 Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2014 Fiction Fellowships at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She currently lives in Lyon, France.
Things We Found When the Water Went Down will be published by Black Balloon in the fall of 2016, and will be distributed by Publishers Group West. The finalists for this year’s prize were Anne Corbitt, Joan Frank, and Karen Tucker.
Founded in 2013, the prize is named for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a one-eyed, one-armed British naval commander made famous for his victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars—a man “who defied convention at every turn.”
Mike Meginnins won the inaugural Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for his debut novel, Fat Man and Little Boy, which was published in October 2014.
John Lahr won in biography for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton); David Brion Davis won in general nonfiction for The Problem of Slavery In the Age of Emancipation (Knopf); and the criticism prize was awarded posthumously to Ellen Willis for The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press), edited by Willis’s daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz. Phil Klay won the John Leonard Prize for his National Book Award–winning short story collection, Redeployment (Penguin Press); the John Leonard Prize recognizes an outstanding first book in any genre. Alexandra Schwartz, an assistant editor at the New Yorker, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
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The finalists, who each receive $5,000, were Francesca Marciano for her collection 
This year’s shortlisted stories are 
I’ve been thinking of Virginia Woolf and her “moments of being,” the captured experiences and memories that press up, suddenly intense and vivid, and the “room of one’s own” she argued for as a necessary space to write (and of course there is her call for an income to make it possible—five hundred pounds, was it?). Mostly, I have thought of this space as literal. In New York City, perhaps not a whole room in our cramped living quarters, but at least a corner. Right now I’m thinking of the room where the Voices From War workshop meets, not in an apartment, not tucked away, but in a community center at the 14th Street Y in New York City. Instead of an empty room for solitude, the physical space is populated. Around the table are veterans from multiple generations, mostly men, a woman or two. Mark the participants’ ages and then the decades, and we can unpeel eras of war: Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea. A lot of unknowns within a wide array of experiences, even among those with commonalities. But the space is shared and everyone has stories, some of which they will write about.
This has become more important to me than I expected, more important than I can even understand. These writers and their stories are the tiles in the mosaic of our history. Stories not yet written, stories (factual or fiction) not fully formed until they arrive from their authors on paper, later edited, shared, and revisited.
The Windham Campbell Prizes were established in 2013 by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. There is no submission process, and winners are determined by an international group of invited nominators, a jury in each category, and an anonymous selection committee.
If I was invisible 
Carl Phillips, the 
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