好色先生TV’s own Professor Jessica Handler has won the for Fiction for her first novel, .
Designed to honor great Southern voices, the Southern Book Prize is awarded by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) to books published in the previous year that are Southern in nature 鈥� either by a Southern author, or set in the South, or both.
鈥淲hat was the best Southern book of the year?鈥�
Nominated by booksellers and selected via a popular vote by Southern booksellers and their customers, the 2020 Southern Book Prize Winners were selected from a list of finalists from ballots submitted by over 1000 Southern readers, representing over 150 Southern independent bookstores.聽 The chosen books represent the indie answer to the question 鈥淲hat was the best Southern book of the year?鈥�
According to Brian Lampkin of , the novel is 鈥渁 grand, dark, mysterious historical novel filled with dark power and ambivalence. The Magnetic Girl captures a time and place, not only in the life of a teenage girl, but in our country as well. Filled with the shifting longings of adolescence against a vaudeville backdrop, Handler’s novel explores the dangerous journey from childhood to adulthood when our budding powers both enthrall and terrify us.鈥�
The Magnetic Girl was up against novels by聽聽,听, , and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner .
Handler is also the author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir and Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief, and regularly publishes essays and non-fiction features on NPR and in publications such as Newsweek and The Washington Post.
