Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the United Kingdom, where she resides. Her short fiction has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and the Florida Review’s Leiby Prize. Other stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, and Nimrod. A former Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, she has received additional support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the British Library. Those Who Vanish is her first book.
Winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Taking place during the decades-long civil conflict, Those Who Vanish follows the stories of Guatemalan citizens and North American expats set on a collision course by war. Martyrs and missionaries, guerrillas and gringos are thrown together amid political violence. A peace worker shelters a rebel fighter. An exile returns to confront the legacy of her parents’ murders. The Virgin Mary begins appearing above an elderly woman’s stove. Set in a world of daily disappearances, the collection addresses a vital question: When all certainties are snatched away, what remains of lives, of memory, of faith?