First Novelist Festival traces award winners from conception to publication
Established playwright Victor Lodato was honored this past week as the 2010 winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award during the day-long First Novelist Festival.
Mechelle Hankerson
Assistant Spectrum Editor
Established playwright Victor Lodato was honored this past week as the 2010 winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award during the day-long First Novelist Festival.
Lodato won the First Novelist Award for his novel, “Mathilda Savitch,” which details the life of a young girl after the death of her older sister. As she struggles to find comfort in her real life, she creates a world of her own, based on her own invented logic.
A review in The Guardian proclaimed that “There cannot be a recent portrait of downbeat, defiant adolescence that is as convincing as that of Lodato’s eponymous anti-heroine.”
Lodato was not sure that “Mathilda Savitch” would ever become a novel, and didn’t begin the novel as such.
“I assumed it to be a monologue, but it (started to become) a pretty long monologue,” Lodato told the group gathered at the question and answer session that was the first of two festival events.
The book was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It has been translated into eight languages and will be released in 11 countries.
The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award was created in 2001 by playwright Laura Browder and novelist Tom De Haven. The award was originally funded by local writer and VCU alumnus David Baldacci, and now receives funding from VCU’s English department, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Honors College, VCU’s Barnes and Noble Bookstore and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences.
The award is meant to recognize rising new talent in the literary world and featured, in addition to the afternoon question and answer session, an evening panel discussion talking about the process of publishing the novel.
The First Novelist Festival is meant to highlight the journey of the awarded book from conception to publication. Specifically, the festival brings together the author and his or her agent to discuss with attendees the path a new author must take to ultimately publish and promote their new book.
