BIOGRAPHY
Alistair McCartney is the author of The Disintegrations: a Novel (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). The story of a man obsessed with death, the novel blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, story and eulogy, poetry and obituary.
The Disintegrations won the Publishing Triangle’s 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction and was named one of the best works of fiction of 2017 by The Seattle Times and Entropy Magazine.
His first novel, The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) took Rimbaud’s method of systematic derangement and applied it to the form of the encyclopedia. TEOTWB was a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award 2009 and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 2009, and was in Seattle Times Best Ten Books of 2008.
McCartney’s writing has also appeared in 3:AM, Fence, Animal Shelter (Semiotexte), Bloom, Lies/Isles, Gertrude, Crush Fanzine, 1913, James White Review, Scott Heim’s The First Time I Heard series, Karen Finley’s Aroused, and other journals and anthologies.
Born in Perth, Western Australia, he lives in Venice, California. He teaches fiction in Antioch University LA’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, oversees AULA’s undergraduate creative writing concentration, and curates their Literary Uprising reading series. He has presented at institutions throughout the country, including CUNY Grad Center, PEN Center USA, AWP, Teacher’s and Writer’s Collaborative New York, and UW Madison. He was Artist in Residence for Art Workshop International in Italy in 2019.