Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

A 53-year-old, self-described “hillbilly” may just be the “next important voice in American fiction,” said Jeffrey A. Trachtenburg in The Wall Street Journal. Donald Ray Pollock worked 32 years at an Ohio paper mill before he started writing fiction, but his first collection of stories is drawing comparisons to Sherwood Anderson, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor. The book’s title, Knockemstiff, is the name of Pollock’s hometown. Its characters live the violent, booze-soaked lives you’d expect to find in a place where even road signs are intended as a warning to outsiders. “The suggestion was that they’d knock you stiff,” Pollock says. That said, Pollock’s stories are fiction. “It was a rough place,” he says, “but it wasn’t nearly as wild as the stuff that’s going on in my stories.”

Pollock’s unlikely personal story finds him today working toward a master’s degree at Ohio State University, said Whitney Pastorek in Entertainment Weekly. That may explain why the onetime dropout is staying humble as the early accolades roll in. Two years ago, when Pollock decided to enroll in the school’s creative writing program and quit his job in the paper mill, he had only been published in obscure literary journals. He chalks up his book contract to luck and takes with a grain of salt any comparisons to Carver or O’Connor. Even so, he says, “I’m glad those are the writers they’ve been choosing. They’re not like, ‘He’s the next Danielle Steel,’ you know?”