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Madeleine Watts is a writer of fiction, stories, and essays. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, HEAT, The White Review, Literary Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Bookforum, and Meanjin among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Madeleine grew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne. After a decade living in New York, she is now based in Berlin where she lives with her husband, the writer Vijay Khurana. Elegy, Southwest is her second novel.
Elegy, Southwest is an expansive, ambitious novel that brings a new dimension to love and loss. Madeleine Watts is a formidable novelist. * Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries * ‘Full of grit and a vivid, tender affection for the environments of the American West, Watts’ urgent novel weaves a lush landscape of grief and solace. I've rarely seen a writer capture the atmosphere of climate change and loss so vividly, or the frenzied urge to leap into some form of action – all in prose that kept me glued to its pages right to the bittersweet end.’ * Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun * ‘Elegy, Southwest is a novel composed of the details that accumulate in the wake of loss: of a relationship, of a weather pattern, of a moment in time. Watts elegantly weaves a love story with deep research on its cinematic setting to ask a poignant question: What do you do with all that remains – from the tragedy of hyper-specific memories, to photographs, to the electronic devices we use to track our “health data”– after something ends?’ * Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts * ‘Watts has written an elegiac novel that wanders through altered landscapes and memory to perceptively chart the meandering course of grief amidst immense loss. Elegy, Southwest is an intimate chronicle of fragile lives confronting the vastness of the natural sublime and the meaning of love.’ * Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain * ‘Madeline Watts is an uncommonly perceptive and daring writer. Her sensitivity to the grief of this specific territory, the desert Southwest, and its people is a profound gift.’ * Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness * Haunting and hypnotic, absorbing and provocative, Elegy, Southwest is the novel I’ve been waiting for. Watts’ cool, precise prose calls to mind Joan Didion and Alexandra Kleeman, but this singular novel is something new, entirely. New and breathtaking. * Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year * ‘Elegy, Southwest is a haunting meditation on the enduring nature of love in the face of cascading losses—those we can see coming and those we can’t. The interior landscapes in Watt’s wise exploration of art and scholarship and science are just as complex and threatened, just as precarious, as the river Eloise studies so closely. A truly captivating and lovely novel.’ * Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity *
