Advocate Awards Prize

Kathleen E. Hale ’09 won the Louis Begley Prize for Fiction for her short story about a young girl who channels her fear about her mother’s cancer diagnosis into an obsession with “bloodthirsty” and “scary” animals.

The $1000 prize—which was established in 2000 in honor of former Harvard Advocate editor and contributor Louis Begley ’54—is awarded by the Advocate’s Board of Trustees each year to the best undergraduate fiction piece published in the Advocate, the College’s quarterly literary magazine.

Over two dozen students and faculty members crowded into the Advocate’s sanctum for the award’s ceremony where both Begley, the author of “About Schmidt,” and English professor Louis Menand, the judge of the Begley prize, praised the merits of Hale’s short story.

“This is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, and we’ll be hearing a lot from her in the future,” said Begley of Hale’s promise as a writer. “This is a story that is good enough to be in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic.”

Menand introduced Hale’s story with a speech on the elements of a great story, drawing upon examples from writers like John Updike, James Joyce, and O. Henry, He told the audience that he chose her piece because it embodied the abstract quality that Joyce called the “whatness of a thing” which is the ability to give the reader “a pang, a shiver, a dip.”

“When I was reading Kathleen’s story, it really jumped out at me. I thought to myself, ‘Now that’s a story,’” said Menand. “The story has a great voice. She created a great character—this kid with a very moving voice.”

Hale, who has been published in the Advocate before, said that she was completely surprised when she heard that she had won the prize because she never expects people to like her writing since “it’s all about animals and kids.”

She said she wrote from the perspective of a child partly because it was the way she understood her character and partly because she believes her voice as a writer has never matured beyond that of a fourteen year-old.

Begley believes that the prize is an important addition to what Menand calls the “great” undergraduate English program for fledgling writers.

According to Begley, the Advocate gives young writers a chance to be nurtured and inspired by other aspiring authors, as well as the “heady rush” of being published for the first time.

“I love the Advocate,” said Begley. “And the prize is another excuse for me to keep coming back.”