The Malahat Review 2016 Novella Prize Winner

The Malahat Review #195 features Anne Marie Todkill’s story “Next of Kin,” winner of the 2016 Novella Prize. Todkill’s entry was chosen from 225 submissions by three final judges: Mark Anthony Jarman, Stephen Marche, and Joan Thomas. She has been awarded $1,500 in prize money and publication.

Of “Next of Kin,” the judges said: “With its controlled reveal of complications, it has the drive of a mystery story—but the mystery under investigation is the intricacies of a family over time. Anne Marie Todkill is an accomplished writer, offering surprising and astute insights into the relationship between sisters. Her dialogue is sharp and she is especially incisive in writing about sex. Her narrator Marian speaks with a knowing voice, at odds with her ‘small life’; the things she withholds come to the reader as a series of small explosions. Todkill imposes no pattern over events and offers her characters no epiphanies. Instead, incidents refract off each other and the story speaks powerfully through its silences. Like all good novellas, ‘Next of Kin’ offers both the concentrated pleasures of a short story and the scope of a novel.”

Read an interview with the Anne Marie Todkill here.