THE AVES by Ryane Nicole Granados (YA/MG)
ISTANBUL CROSSING by Timothy Jay Smith (Adult)
Brenda Peterson was the YA/MG judge for the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize. She is the critically acclaimed author of over 23 books, including six novels—from River of Light (Knopf) to Becoming the Enemy (Graywolf) to Duck and Cover (Harper Collins), which was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year” and hailed as a “wicked, black comedy.” Her recent memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind, was selected as a “Top Ten Best Non-Fiction” book by the Christian Science Monitor and an Indie Next “Great Read,” by Independent Booksellers. Peterson’s latest non-fiction book is Wolf Nation: The Life, Death, and Return of Wild American Wolves, chosen as a “Best Conservation Book of the Year” by Forbes magazine; her Your Life is a Book: How to Craft and Publish Your Memoir was an Oprah.com selection.
By Aimee LaBrie
“Mordantly funny, eerily discomforting, and unexpectedly wise – an audacious gathering of stories mirroring our contemporary world.” – Joyce Carol Oates
Set in the City of Brotherly Love, this collection of short stories by award-winning writer Aimee LaBrie offers a darkly humorous take on the difficulties of finding connection and meaning in a fragmented world. Through it all, LaBrie plays with what it means to struggle for a voice in jobs and relationships apathetic to the female experience. Whether told by an actor/waitress, nurse/sadist, realtor/former child star, or bartender/thief, the female voices in this collection traverse modern-day womanhood loudly and defiantly, telling their stories with acerbic humor, persevering wit, and howling rage.
Aimee LaBrie lives in Princeton, New Jersey and works as a lecturer and Senior Program Administrator for Creative Writing at Rutgers university. Her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was chosen as the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her stories have appeared in Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cleaver Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, Permafrost, and other literary journals. In 2012, she won first place in Zoetrope’s All-Story Fiction contest.
Jellyfish DreamingBy D. K. McCutchen
“Jellyfish Dreaming is one of the most inventive stories I’ve read in a very long time.” – Rosanne Parry, author of the NYT Bestseller, A Whale of the Wild
On the cliffs above the Great Garbage Ocean, in a university’s ageing experimental facility, Jack floats in a tank of poisonous jellyfish. The 200-year-old intersex kid remembers things nobody else does, from before the environmental catastrophes that erased the world as we know it.
D. K. McCutchen is Senior Lecturer ll at UMass Amherst in the College of Natural Sciences. Previously Provost’s Designee and one time Chair of the University Writing Committee, she is currently Co-Associate Director of Junior-Year Writing for the UMass Writing Program. She has an MFA in creative writing from UMass and a graduate Diploma in Science, DipSci from Otago University, New Zealand. Her words can be found in Fourth Genre, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Isotope, and Identity Theory to name just a few. Her first book, The Whale Road, will be republished in the USA with JackLeg Press in 2023/24, coinciding with her 2023 LGF Prize winning title, Jellyfish Dreaming.
The 2021 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize winning titles are now available through Leapfrog Press and all good bookstores. The prize winners were judged by Carnegie Medal winning author, Anthony McGowan (Lark) for the YA | MG category, and New York Times bestselling author, Ann Hood (Fly Girl) for the Adult category. They winning books are:
