Lockwood, Patricia

Patricia Lockwood (born April 27, 1982) is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Beginning a career in poetry, her collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Later prose works received more exposure and notoriety. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. In addition to her writing activities, she has been a contributing editor for the London Review of Books since 2019 and was a judge for the 2026 Booker Prize. Lockwood works across a variety of genres. "Your work can flow into the shape that people make for you," she told Slate in an interview in 2020. "Or you can try to break that shape." In 2022, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for her contributions to the field of experimental writing. Lockwood is the only writer with both fiction and nonfiction works selected as the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times. At four years, she also holds the record for the shortest span between repeat appearances on the list. Kirkus Reviews has called her "our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art," and Garden & Gun: "goddess of the avant-garde." "Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor," observed Beejay Silcox for The Guardian, "a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness." Writing for The New York Times Book Review, Merve Emre dubbed Lockwood "a modern word witch, her writing splendid and sordid by turns."