Book Awards | Literary Arts

Lance Olsen’s “Always Crashing in the Same Car” Wins This Year’s 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction

Artists of Utah is thrilled to announce that Always Crashing in the Same Car by Lance Olsen has been awarded the 2024 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction. Olsen, an experimental novelist, essayist, and professor, is renowned for his innovative exploration of memory, time, and consciousness. His prismatic, boundary-pushing works—including Dreamlives of Debris and Skin Elegies—have earned him a place as a leading figure in contemporary literature.

In Always Crashing in the Same Car, Olsen explores the final days of David Bowie, weaving a kaleidoscopic narrative that mixes fact with fiction. Set during Bowie’s battle with liver cancer as he worked on his final album Black Star, the novel examines identity, legacy, and the fluid nature of time and memory. Through fragmented perspectives—including Bowie, an academic writing about him, and those within his orbit—Olsen presents a poetic meditation on art, fame, and mortality.

Our review of Always Crashing in the Same Car celebrates Olsen’s ability to blur the lines between history and imagination, offering a complex meditation on the human condition. The novel culminates in two contradictory endings, reflecting the paradoxes inherent in both Bowie’s life and Olsen’s narrative style.

Olsen, who taught for 16 years at the University of Utah before retiring in 2023, continues to inspire and challenge readers with his inventive storytelling. Always Crashing in the Same Car, published by the University of Alabama Press, exemplifies Olsen’s mastery of form and his ongoing contributions to literature.

Since its inception in 2013, the 15 Bytes Book Awards have recognized outstanding books by Utah authors or those with a Utah connection. Previous winners of the award have included Alyssa Quinn, Robert H. Van Wagoner, David Cranes, Gabriel Tallent, James McLaughlin, Jeri Parker, Braden Hepner. This year’s finalists were selected based on the overall conception and quality of writing, and we are proud to honor Lance Olsen as the recipient of this year’s award.

Categories: Book Awards | Literary Arts

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