Alistair McCartney, author of the 2017 book The Disintegrations, recently attended an awards ceremony at the New School in New York City to receive the Publishing Triangle’s 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. At the ceremony, McCartney thanked his colleagues at AULA for all of their “human and creative support.” He also gave a reading at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division at NYC’s LGBTQ Center.
The cross-genre novel blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, story and eulogy, poetry and obituary. It is the story of a man obsessed with death, and a study of Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, which is located directly across from the AULA campus.
Alistair McCartney accepting the award at the New School in NYC
“I’m thrilled that my novel The Disintegrations won the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. It was an honor to be a finalist alongside four other amazing writers, so to be the recipient means the world to me, The Triangle is an organization I have such deep respect for. The prize also means so much to me on a historical level: Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley were incredible writers and life-partners, who both died of AIDS in 1988, when the epidemic was taking so many lives and decimating the Gay community. A friend told me that Grumley was revising a novel at the time of his death, and that Robert finished the work for him, before passing himself a few months later. To have my novel, an auto-fictional investigation into death, receive a prize bearing both their names reminds me of how as LGBTQ writers it’s so important for us to think about the traditions we’re writing in, to pay attention and give thanks to those writers who came before us, wrote before us, and created a space that made our writing possible.”
