Welcome…

… to the domain of Thomas E. Kennedy (also known in some literary contexts as Thomas Kennedy, or, in his incarnation as a song-writer, Tom Kennedy).

Thank you for visiting. We invite you to step in and explore.

In case you don’t know Kennedy’s writing, The New York Times has described it as “shimmering with emotional honesty,” The Cape Cod Voice as “wildly inventive and wickedly comic.”

Kennedy writes about the turn of the seasons, about the beauty of the senses, of existence, of language itself. He writes about love, death, birth, parenthood, cruelty, compassion, torture, music, fear, and hope. He writes about the mistakes we make — and the small choices, good and bad, that decide our future.

In nominating one of his novels as a notable book of the year, The Kansas City Star wrote:

“No one writes about the loves and lives of men better than Kennedy, including their relationships with their own children.”

Kennedy writes about a score of places — including Copenhagen, New York, Paris, Dublin, San Francisco, Helsinki, South Africa, Chile — and his books and story collections have been praised by a range of publications in several countries: from The Literary Review to The Review of Contemporary Fiction, from the Irish Edition to Euroman, from Copenhagen’s Politiken and Information to Chile’s Las Ultimas Noticias, from Tokyo’s Abiko to Frank magazine in Paris.

About his Copenhagen Quartet, Frank magazine wrote, in awarding Kennedy the Frank Expatriate Writing Award in 2002:

“Kennedy has done for Copenhagen what Joyce did for Dublin.”

And these words are from the founder of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, Dr. Inge Genefke, who has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize:

“With the great talent of an artist [Kennedy] has created a language which brilliantly describes not only the intense loneliness and distress of those who have survived torture, but also the struggle, hope, and possibility of their healing.”

In March of 2007, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) at its annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia sponsored a panel on Kennedy’s fiction, entitled, “Thomas E. Kennedy: A Lifetime in Literature.” At the panel, six professors, writers, and editors spoke about various aspects of Kennedy’s work. Those presentations will be published in the coming months in South Carolina Review, New Letters magazine, Cimarron Review, and Perigee.

The Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 issues of South Carolina Review will include a focus on Kennedy’s work, including a full bibliography, an in-depth interview, several essays and photographs, and original fiction by Kennedy. As more information about these publications becomes available, it will appear at this website under Books: New Releases.

We hope you will want to roam this site, let the work speak for itself in the excerpts here, let Kennedy speak for himself and read from his work in the film clips. You are a welcome guest. And we hope you will be inspired to let us know what you think.

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