Alarcón wins 2018 Clark Fiction Prize for ‘The King is Always Above the People’

'The King is Always Above the People' is a collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families and other tales of high stakes journeys.

Daniel Alarcón's story collection, The King is Always Above the People, has won the 2018 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. The prize of $25,000 is one of the largest literary awards in the United States.

Established at Texas State University in 2016 and administered by the Department of English, the prize is designed to recognize an exceptional, recently-published book-length work of fiction in celebration of the Clarks’ lifelong contributions to, and love for, literature and the arts. 

Alarcón will be honored March 26 at Texas State. The award ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 3:30 p.m. in Flowers Hall, room 230. A reading and signing by Alarcón will follow.

The King is Always Above the People is a collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families and other tales of high stakes journeys. Alarcón explores issues of migration, betrayal, family secrets, doomed love and uncertain futures, transforming them into deeply human stories. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal." And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras," a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

Alarcón is the author of At Night We Walk in Circles, which was a finalist for the 2014 PEN-Faulkner Award, as well as the story collection War by Candlelight and the novel Lost City Radio. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, n+1 and Harper’s, and in 2010, he was named one of the New Yorker's "20 under 40." He is executive producer of Radio Ambulante and teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.

The 2018 Clark Prize short list included Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash, In the Distance by Hernan Diaz and The Gift by Barbara Browning. Nominations of works published in 2018 were solicited from 12 prominent writers on the condition of anonymity. The permanent fiction faculty at Texas State narrowed those nominations down to the short list, and author Karen Russell, Texas State’s University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing 2017-2019, made the final selection.

About the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Literary Endowment

L.D. and Laverne Harrell Clark donated their home and other property to Texas State in 2009 to create an endowment to support writers-in-residence. The Clark Literary Endowment funds the annual L.D. and Laverne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, which is among the most generous fiction prizes in the country. It also funds a writers-in-residence program that offers one-year residencies to graduates of the Texas State MFA program at the Clarks’ historic home on Main Street in Smithville, 55 miles east of the Texas State campus. The writers-in-residence program is sponsored by the Department of English and MFA Program in Creative Writing within the College of Liberal Arts. The endowment also funds numerous scholarships for Texas State MFA students.

For more information, visit www.english.txstate.edu/clarkfictionprize.html

About Texas State University

Founded in 1899, Texas State University is among the largest universities in Texas with an enrollment of 38,694 students on campuses in San Marcos and Round Rock. Texas State’s 181,000-plus alumni are a powerful force in serving the economic workforce needs of Texas and throughout the world. Designated an Emerging Research University by the State of Texas, Texas State is classified under “Doctoral Universities: Higher Research Activity,” the second-highest designation for research institutions under the Carnegie classification system.