Chia-Chia Lin wins 2020 Clark Fiction Prize for 'The Unpassing'

Chia-Chia Lin's novel, "The Unpassing," has won the 2020 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. 

Lin will be honored during a virtual event later this spring.  

"The Unpassing" is a searing debut novel that explores community, identity and the myth of the American dream through an immigrant family in Alaska. In Lin's novel, a Taiwanese immigrant family of six is struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive.

With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, "The Unpassing" is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.

"There's a lot to recommend 'The Unpassing,' but perhaps what lingers most---besides Chia-Chia Lin's gliding, innovative prose, and cast of indelible characters---is the pervading notion that grief transforms the world into a place of shimmering malice and beauty," said Téa Obreht, author of "The Tiger's Wife" and Texas State M.F.A. endowed chair.

Lin graduated with an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Henfield Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, NewYorker.com, The New York Times, Zyzzyva and more. She currently lives in Northern California.The 2020 Clark Prize short list included "Sabrina & Corina" by Kali Fajardo-Anstine and "Where Reasons End" by Yiyun Li. Nominations of works published in 2019 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 Obreht made the final selection.