This week, Ira Sternberg spoke with Kris Saknussemm.
Novelist and artist Kris Saknussemm’s latest play “The Humble Assessment, ” was a featured part of the recent Las Vegas Fringe Festival at the Las Vegas Little Theatre.
Saknussemm graduated with honors from Dartmouth College and holds an MA from the University of Washington. He has won First Prize in the Boston Review and River Styx Short Fiction Contests, and received the Fiction Collective 2 Award for Innovative Writing, in addition to publishing in a wide range of journals.
His nonfiction has appeared in Playboy, Nerve.com, The Writer, The Rumpus, and every significant newspaper in Australia. The recording of his work Memory Wound was awarded First Prize in the Missouri Review’s Audio Competition in the 10 Minute Play category.
“Zanesville,” his first novel was published to critical acclaim by the Villard Books imprint of Random House in 2005, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and released in hardcover in Russia. A surreal thriller in the noir tradition called PRIVATE MIDNIGHT was published by the Overlook Press in 2009 and has become a bestseller in France and Italy.
He has been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a featured guest at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Bali and the Gallagher Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.