Victor Lodato

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Photograph: François Robert

Books

Associate: Seren Adams

Books

Victor Lodato is a playwright, poet, and novelist. MATHILDA SAVITCH, his debut, was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel” and was deemed a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail.  The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries. Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He was born and raised in New Jersey, and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

Victor's new novel, EDGAR & LUCY, was published by Head of Zeus in 2018. 

Victor was longlisted for The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award 2020, having twice been shortlisted in previous years. 

His latest novel, HONEY, will be published by Harper in the US in April 2024.

Praise for EDGAR & LUCY (2018):

'A domestic fable about grief and redemption likely to leave readers emotionally threadbare.' Kirkus

'His second novel, the wonder-filled and magisterial "Edgar and Lucy,"... so wide-ranging is it in its concerns and themes, and so ardent is it in its desire to bring everything — life, love, family, loneliness, magic, spiritualism and death — together in its pages... The book pushes the boundaries of beauty..' Chicago Tribune

Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2018

Apollo

Eight-year-old Edgar Allan Fini is haunted – by his father's absence, his mother's secrets, and the ghosts of his grandmother's past. But he recalls nothing of the accident about which people still whisper.

When Edgar meets a man with his own tragic story, he is drawn deep into a damaged, grief-stricken world. Lucy must confront the demons that plague her, to save her son and herself.

Tinged with wonder and a dark fairytale heart, Edgar and Lucy is a gripping coming-of-age story about the painful and loving ties that bind us

2009

Farrar Straus Giroux

Fear doesn't come naturally to Mathilda Savitch. She prefers to look right at the things nobody else can bring themselves to mention: for example, the fact that her beloved older sister is dead, pushed in front of a train by a man still on the loose. Her grief-stricken parents have basically been sleepwalking ever since, and it is Mathilda's sworn mission to shock them back to life. Her strategy? Being bad.

Mathilda decides she's going to figure out what lies behind the catastrophe. She starts sleuthing through her sister's most secret possessions' e-mails, clothes, notebooks, whatever her determination and craftiness can ferret out. More troubling, she begins to apply some of her older sister's magical charisma and powers of seduction to the unraveling situations around her. In a storyline that thrums with hints of ancient myth, Mathilda has to risk a great deal, in fact, has to leave behind everything she loves in order to discover the truth.