About the Author
“I was raised against my will to follow the fabulist tradition.
It’s a part of me now. The truth lies in fiction.”
—Matilda Johns
If writers are what they write, then Owen Thomas is a fiction. Not a fiction in the way that Ebenezer wonders whether the Ghost of Christmas Past is merely a gastric illusion brought on by an “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, or a crumb of cheese.” Nor in the way that Verbal Kent invented Keyser Söze from scraps of information on a police station bulletin board. Rather, Owen Thomas is a fiction born of creative suffocation, less a product of indigestion or criminal-minded design than a full-on psychotic snap. After twenty-five years as an attorney practicing civil litigation, the emergence of an alter ego was probably inevitable.
But if there is any truth in fiction (and there always is), then here is the truth. Owen Thomas is a life-long Alaskan with an abiding love of original fiction writing and storytelling whose ultimate purpose is always to reconnect the reader with humanity. Owen is a product of the Anchorage School District and a graduate of Duke University and Duke Law School. Over the years, while his responsible, wage-earning identity has been busy representing clients and writing legal briefs, Owen has written three novels: Lying Under Comets: A Love Story of Passion, Murder, Snacks and Graffiti; The Lion Trees (Winner of The 2015 Kindle Book Award, Winner of The Global eBook Award, Winner of The Books And Author.com 2015 Book of the Year Award, The Eric Hoffer Award for fiction, A Finalist for The Beverly Hills International Book Awards, a Finalist for The First Horizon Book Award, and awarded Honorable Mentions at The London Book Festival, The New York Book Festival, The Southern California Book Festival, The Great Northwest Book Festival, The Los Angeles Book Festival, The Great Southeast Book Festival, The Pacific Rim Book Festival, The Amsterdam Book Festival and The Hollywood Book Festival); and a novel of interconnected short fiction, including six novellas and four short stories, entitled Signs of Passing Winner of the Pacific Book Awards for Short Fiction , Winner of the Great Southwest Book Festival, Runner-Up in The Amsterdam Book Festival, Runner-Up in The Great Midwest Book Festival, Runner-Up in The Great Southeast Book Festival, Runner-Up in The Pacific Rim Book Festival, receiving Honorable Mentions at The London Book Festival, The Paris Book Festival, The Los Angeles Book Festival, The Great Northwest Book Festival, The SanFrancisco Book Festival, and The New England Book Festival, and designated among the 100 Notable Books of 2015 by Shelf Unbound Magazine. Additional short fiction pieces are collected and reproduced in their entirety at Tiny Points of Life. Owen’s short story “Everything Stops” has been selected for publication in an anthology of short fiction published by Fiction Attic Press called “Modern Shorts”, available at Amazon. Owen’s short stories “Nothing To Worry About” and “Island Santa” have recently been released for purchase at Blurb.com and Amazon.com, respectively.
For the fifth consecutive year since he has been measuring his commercial success as an author, Owen has not won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Also, to great acclaim, he has not won the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, in 2018, Owen was not nominated for a Pulitzer.
When he is not writing, Owen can be found recreating and taking photographs in the grandeur of his Alaskan backyard and in the middle of the dream that is Hawaii, many of which you can find on Owen’s photo blog, 1000 Words per Frame.
Owen fervently believes our problem is not that life is too short, but that it tends to be much too narrow. Also, he is increasingly concerned that referring to oneself in the third-person is dangerously habit-forming.
Owen is very pleased you have chosen to visit this site.
INTERVIEWS:
Laine Cunningham of The Writer’s Resource Blog Interviews Owen Thomas