Rita Bullwinkel interview: ‘I obsessively competed in every sport I could find'
The author of Headshot, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about the personal experiences that inspired her novel and the shapeshifting power of Virginia Woolf
Rita Bullwinkel
Rita Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in the White Review, BOMB, NOON and Guernica, among others
She is the author of the short story collection Belly Up, which won a 2022 Whiting Award. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is the Editor of McSweeney’s, the Deputy Editor of The Believer, a Contributing Editor for NOON, and an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco, where she teaches courses in creative writing, zines and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.
Headshot, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
A gutsy, unflinching depiction of a young women’s boxing tournament in Nevada and a profound examination of identity, destiny and family dynamics
— The 2024 judges on Headshot
All nominated books
Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the boxing ring and above and beyond it
