My latest novel the prize

---

 I need to tell you about a photograph.

In 1972, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut took a picture of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked down a road, her clothes burned off by a napalm attack, her mouth open in a scream the camera couldn’t record. That photograph won the Pulitzer Prize. It helped end a war. It became one of the most famous images in the history of photojournalism. The girl’s name was Phan Thi Kim Phuc, and she spent the next fifty years being recognized, stopped, pointed at, and asked to relive the worst moment of her life by strangers who saw her not as a person but as a symbol.

I thought about that for a long time. Not about the photograph—about her. About what it’s like to be the person inside the frame. To have your worst moment preserved in silver halide and published in every newspaper on the planet. To be nine years old and screaming and have that scream become the thing the world knows you for. Does she hate the image? Does she look at it? Does she wish the photographer had put the camera down and picked her up instead?

THE PRIZE is my attempt to sit with the question instead of answering it. It’s a novel about a photograph taken in the aftermath of a school bombing—a photograph that wins the Pulitzer Prize and destroys the four people inside it. A firefighter carrying a dead boy. A thirteen-year-old girl standing beside them, bleeding and screaming. A mother who will never hold her son again. And the photographer who pressed the shutter and spent the rest of his life wishing he hadn’t.

The novel grew out of that question about Kim Phuc, but it became something else—a story about how a single image can mean completely different things to the people inside it. The firefighter sees his guilt. The mother sees her grief. The girl sees herself, frozen in a moment she can’t escape. The photographer sees the thing that made him famous and the thing that ruined him. Same photograph. Four different prisons.

THE PRIZE is contemporary literary fiction, complete at 98,000 words. In editing now.

 In the aftermath of a school bombing in Columbus, Ohio, a photograph is taken that changes four lives forever. Alex Kelly, thirteen, is the girl in the image — bleeding, screaming, standing beside a firefighter who carries a dead boy from the rubble. She hates the photograph, can't stop looking at it, and carries a copy in a ziplock bag while running a months-long truancy con her mother knows nothing about. Ronny Martinez is the firefighter the world calls a hero, but Ronny knows what the camera didn't capture: the minute he walked away from that boy's body to search for his partner — a partner already dead beneath a collapsed stairwell. Jordan Lowe is the boy's mother, a woman who counts everything in groups of five and whose grief leads her into an affair with Ronny — the last man to hold her son — that becomes the architecture of her survival and the thing most likely to destroy them both. And Demian Ochoa is the photojournalist who pressed the shutter, won the Pulitzer, and flew to Columbus carrying the dead boy's mother's letter in his breast pocket, looking for a forgiveness none of them are sure they can give. When Demian and Alex form an unlikely bond — he teaches her photography, she teaches him how to see without hiding behind a lens — Alex begins pulling all four of them into the same orbit, engineering collisions between people who have every reason to hate each other, believing that the photograph that froze them in the worst moment of their lives might also be the thing that sets them free.