Patty Yumi Cottrell


Patty Yumi Cottrell is an American writer. They are the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace and the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award.

Biography

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. They were raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee.
Cottrell started writing their first novel while in their early thirties. In 2012 they received their M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After moving from New York to Los Angeles, they completed the novel in 2016. The resulting book, a "stylized contemporary noir" titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney's in 2017. Cottrell has called the book "an anti-memoir". 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. 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". The Guardian called the book "electrifying in its freshness" and the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a strange and lovely thing". Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won a National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book in the Fiction category. It also won Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction.
In 2018 Cottrell received the Whiting Award in fiction, which is given to promising writers in the early stages of their careers. The selection committee particularly noted that their writing "opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity".

Recognition