UC Creative Writing Professor Chris Bachelder Awarded Prestigious Terry Southern Prize

Chris Bachelder, associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences’ creative writing department, has won the prestigious Terry Southern Prize. The award, bestowed annually by The Paris Review, recognizes humor and wit in a piece of writing published in their pages within the last year. The Paris Review was established in 1953 and remains one of the world’s leading literary magazines, publishing poetry and fiction from both established and new voices in contemporary literature.

Bachelder, who joined UC’s creative writing faculty in 2011, received the honor for

The Throwback Special

, a “comic masterpiece” serialized throughout four issues of the quarterly journal. The novel follows a group of middle-aged men who participate in a yearly tradition that restages the infamous 1985 football game in which Joe Theismann suffered a career-ending leg fracture on live television.

The book, published by W.W. Norton & Company in March, carries the distinct style readers now expect from Bachelder—a blurring of the comic and tragic, often rendered in excruciating, hilarious detail.   

“I began with a keen interest in writing about the Joe Theismann injury, and very gradually the injury became my context, not my subject,” Bachelder said in an earlier interview with Full Stop. “I didn’t set out to write about the melancholy bewilderment of middle-aged men, but that’s where I ended up.”

Bachelder, who watched the violent football play as it first happened, said that his writing naturally gravitates toward the humorous. “I can’t imagine writing a novel that is not essentially comic,” he said. “But as I’ve gotten older I’ve become less interested in zany gags or antic satire. We actually don’t have great ways of talking about the varieties of comic modes, so I don’t even know what to call it. In my mind, The Throwback Special is not satire. What I’m after is tonal complexity, a precise and probing narrative voice that contains paradox and ambivalence so that the humor is inextricably connected to sorrow, grief, frustration.”

Past recipients of The Terry Southern Prize, which comes with a $5,000 award, include Ben Lerner, Elif Batuman, Mark Leyner and Adam Wilson. Founded in 2011, the honor is named after an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter (1924-1995) who is now acknowledged as one of the 20

^th

century’s most innovative cultural forces.

The Throwback Special is Bachelder’s fourth novel. Other works include the acclaimed Bear v. Shark—a farcical examination of American entertainment—and Abbott Awaits, which the New Yorker called “A sharp and brilliant and hilarious portrait of being a parent.”

Bachelder will participate in a reading and signing of The Throwback Special at Joseph-Beth Booksellers’ Rookwood location on Mar. 17 at 7 p.m.