Patty Yumi Cottrell

Cottrell was born in South Korea in 1981 and was adopted, along with two biologically unrelated younger Korean boys, into a family from the Midwestern United States.[1] They were raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee.[2]

Cottrell started writing their first novel while in their early thirties.[3] In 2012 they received their M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[4] After moving from New York to Los Angeles, they completed the novel in 2016.[5] The resulting book, a "stylized contemporary noir" titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney's in 2017.[6] Cottrell has called the book "an anti-memoir".[7] It tells the story of Helen, a woman adopted from Korea at a young age, who returns to her adoptive parents' home in Milwaukee after the suicide of her adoptive brother.[8] Writing for The Rumpus, Liza St. James described the book as "marvelously interior" and praised the writing as "discursive and associative and gripping all at once".[9] The Guardian called the book "electrifying in its freshness"[10] and the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a strange and lovely thing".[11] Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won a National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book in the Fiction category.[12] It also won Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction.[13]

In 2018 Cottrell received the Whiting Award in fiction, which is given to promising writers in the early stages of their careers.[14][15] The selection committee particularly noted that their writing "opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity".[2]

• 2017: Barnes & Noble Discover Award[13]
• 2017: National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book – Fiction[12]
• 2018: Whiting Award[2]

• Cottrell, Patty Yumi (2017). Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. McSweeney's. ISBN 9781944211301.