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. Across eight stories, 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?
Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the UK, where she resides. Her work 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.
King will be in conversation with Anna Lapera, a Guatemalan-American author and educator. Her debut novel, Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice, is an International Latino Book Award winner, a 2025 International Literacy Association Honor Book, and was named one of the Best of 2024 by the New York Public Library, and others. Her forthcoming 2028 novel, Birdsong in the Long Night, is a YA thriller set in 1978 Guatemala City that follows a burgeoning journalist as she awakens to the resistance movements unfolding around her and uncovers the truth about the mother she believed to be long dead. C.