Writer

The Murderess and the Hangman: Update

Hello! I'm happy to report that I've written three quarters of my second novel The Murderess and the Hangman, about 138,000 of 170,000 words. All in all, I should have a complete draft in April 2010.

Please see this link for more details about The Murderess and the Hangman. I just hope you like murder and mayhem, hangings, detective fiction, a grimy London of the nineteenth century, and a female killer. Hopefully this book brings them all to life. As Russ Abbott would say, "I love a party with an atmosphere."

Right, back to it!

Happy reading, and happy writing!

The Pride and the Sorrow: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, 2010 - Second Round!

On February 25th, The Pride and the Sorrow made it to the Second Round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, 2010.

This surprised me a great deal considering there were 5000 entries in the General Fiction category. I look forward to the quarterfinals at the end of March!

To check out my entry - my novel set in New Orleans - please click here.

The Pride and the Sorrow: Bookhabit Novel Award - Winner!

Bookhabit is pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural Bookhabit Unpublished Novel Competition is Matt Fullerty's The Pride and the Sorrow.

Matt receives a US$5000 prize and is "thrilled" about winning the first Bookhabit competition. We will be posting an interview with Matt on Bookhabit shortly. Congratulations from Bookhabit!

The Pride and the Sorrow: Book Review, June 2008

New Zealand novelist Geoff Cush, a member of the Bookhabit judging panel, had the following to say about the Bookhabit Award 2008:

"What made Matt Fullerty's writing stand out, from the very first sentence, was an unusually strong and individual way with words. Taking us into the vanished world of old America and Europe he uses a highly textured language to give an almost physical experience of being in that place and time. Drawing subtle lines between a society top-heavy with leisure and the profligate genius it produced in Morphy, he holds back the historical and personal reckoning while letting it gather and brood like the storm that finally washes away New Orleans. In my view this makes The Pride and the Sorrow a stand-out all rounder in the craft of literary fiction.

Places and characters from The Pride and the Sorrow and The Murderess and the Hangman

Characters and settings from THE PRIDE AND THE SORROW and THE MURDERESS AND THE HANGMAN

Paul Morphy, World Chess Champion

Matt Fullerty, Author Fan Site

The Pride and the Sorrow: Bookhabit Award 2008

Please click the cover to read about the award:

Podcast Interview

You can hear the Bookhabit PodCast (a 23-minute interview) with Matt by clicking here.

Matt Fullerty: Writer Biography

Matt Fullerty was born in Warrington, England and educated at Oxford University (B.A. English) and the University of East Anglia (M.A. Creative Writing), and has a Ph.D. in English from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. He currently teaches as Lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, the University of London.
The Pride and the Sorrow is Matt's first novel. He is now writing a London murder story called The Murderess and the Hangman about an Irish maid who murders her landlady for a few pieces of furniture...and then impersonates her on a murderous spree around London! You can contact Matt at fullerty@gmail.com

The Pride and the Sorrow: Press Release

Paul Morphy's story is a rites of passage tale about a boy who becomes famous by playing chess. It is also a cautionary tale about New Orleans, family pride and a mind who cannot cope with the real world...The Pride and the Sorrow is a cross between Josh Waitzkin's Searching for Bobby Fischer (about a chess prodigy) and Vladimir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (about chess causing madness). Paul resists gambling and dueling and despite Morphy family rivalries he takes on the Europeans at their own game. But the red-light district and temptations on the other side of New Orleans are never far away...

The Pride and the Sorrow: Interview, June 2008

A 23-minute interview with Matt is now available through www.reviewyak.com with Clare Tanner of the Bookhabit Show. "Every month over 20,000 listeners download our podcasts for The Bookhabit Show where we tell the author's story behind the story."

The Academic Novel: Ph.D. dissertation

For more details about my academic work in British and American literature, specifically my PhD dissertation about the "academic novel," please follow this link.

Taking my Ph.D. at George Washington University, I became interested in fiction with professors and students as central characters. I undertook a historical study of the academic genre, from the comic novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, as well as Kingsley Amis, to specific studies such as Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita (1955), and modern fiction by writers including Willy Russell, Tom Sharpe, Michael Chabon, Margaret Edson, Tim O'Brien, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, Richard Russo and J. M. Coetzee. It has been a great experience to write about all these writers and the academic tropes they draw on and re-shape!
My dissertation is entitled The British and American Academic Novel: The Professorroamane, The Comic Campus, The Tragic Self (2008) and is currently available through Proquest.