Patricia Engel

Patricia Engel was born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey.
Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Guernica, Harpur Palate, Nimrod, Slice Magazine, Quarterly West, Sycamore Review, Fourteen Hills, and have received awards including the Boston Review Fiction Prize, a Florida Artist Fellowship in Literature, an Artist Enhancement Grant, distinctions from Narrative Magazine, Kore Press, Salem County College for Women Writers, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Key West Literary Seminar, Hedgebrook, and the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony. Patricia earned her undergraduate degree in French Literature and Art History at New York University and her MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University.

Vida 

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida is the distinct and daring debut by award-winning writer Patricia Engel.

In “Lucho,” Sabina’s family—already “foreigners in a town of blancos”—is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of violence, but she is in turn befriended by the town bad boy who has a secret of his own; in “Desaliento” Sabina surrounds herself with other young drifters who spend their time looking for love and then fleeing from it—until reality catches up with one of them; and in “Vida,” the urgency of Sabina’s self-imposed exile in Miami fades when she meets an enigmatic Colombian woman with a tragic past.

Patricia Engel maps landscapes both actual (New Jersey, New York, Miami, Bogota) and interior in this stunning debut, and the constant throughout is Sabina—serious, witty, alternately cautious and reckless, open to transformation yet skeptical of its lasting power. Infused by a hard-won, edgy wisdom, Vida introduces a sensational new literary voice.

Advance Praise for Vida 

“Gloriously gifted and alarmingly intelligent Engel writes with an almost fable-like intensity, whether she is describing suburban New Jersey or urban Colombia or some other lost place . . . her ability to pierce the hearts of her crazy-ass characters, to fracture a moment into its elementary particles of yearning, cruelty, love and confusion will leave you breathless. Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for.”
    – Junot Díaz, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Patricia Engel writes with a passion, yearning and care, crafting narratives and characters that are so real, you know them, have always known them. Pitch perfect, at once restrained and lush, intelligent, funny and dripping with melancholy, Vida marks the debut of a truly original voice.”
    – Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames

“Vida is emotional and elegant, a look at life through the wise eyes and fine prose of a remarkably talented writer.”
    – Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation

“Engel’s literary works read more like cinematic shorts than simply short stories….The gritty narratives [in Vida] take the reader on a journey through the lives of characters set within the suburbs of New Jersey, New York City, Miami and Bogota.”
    – Ocean Drive, on “People Who Make Miami”

“Between the pop culture and politics of our time, we have become accustomed to language that does not clarify, but clouds. This is why Patricia Engel’s work, with its taut focus, its pained illumination, is so important. In Vida, as much as we come to know her narrator, Sabina, we come to know more fully the inside of our own hearts.”
    – Asha Bandele, author of The Prisoner’s Wife

“Patricia Engel’s Vida is that rare thing: a beautifully crafted book that truly has a story to tell. Brutal in its emotional honesty, graceful in its delivery, Vida signals the arrival of a new literary star.”
    – Mat Johnson, author of Drop and Hunting in Harlem

“Engel navigates issues of class, ethnicity, and identity with finesse…Engel’s prose is refreshingly devoid of pomp and puts a hard focus on the stiff compromises Sabina and her family have had to accept; there’s a striking perspective to these stories.”
    – Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)