My grandfather was a playwright who also wrote for television, and I grew up poring over his old scripts: the drafts dated, scribbled with corrections. The form seemed to invite messiness, imperfection. When, as a teenager, I started writing, it was that hospitality that I gravitated to—pecking out scripts on an old typewriter to replicate the look of my grandfather’s work.
Although I was a working actor, the scripts I wrote existed only for me, and yet the form draws implicit attention to the performers and production professionals who bring those stories to life—people, I was becoming increasingly aware, whose existence was just as imaginary as the characters in these plays (less so, perhaps—at least my characters had names). This realization helped me begin writing fiction, shedding the pretense that this wasn’t, in the words of E.L. Doctorow, “a private excitement of the mind.”
And yet my turn to fiction was not solipsistic. Indeed, the skills that propelled me through those early novels (unpublished and gleefully bad) were skills I’d first developed not in the isolation of reading but in the community of theater. The principles of improvisation—which had taught me to stay attuned to the ways spontaneous quirks of language can erupt into character—were now teaching me how to write a novel.
Since then, I have completed an MFA from the University of Virginia and published six novels, the first of which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. My seventh novel is forthcoming in 2027: Phantoscope and the Double. My work has won the Donald Barthelme Prize, earned me a Jack Hazard Fellowship with the New Literary Project, and been a finalist for Fiction Collective 2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Originally from California, I now live in the Midwest and teach at the University of Iowa.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Kevin Alladice’s Phantoscope and the Double in the summer of 2027.
