Winner of the 2026 Last Syllable Book Award in Fiction Finalist for the Last Syllable Literary Journal Book Awards Interview by Ashmita Mukherjee and Suvendu Ghatak for “The Antilibrary Podcast” Read the Q&A with the author here. Prof. Hogan On His Novel, “A People Without Shame” Interview on the New Books Network Praise [icon name=”quote-left” prefix=”fas”] Imaginative and gripping.– Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [icon name=”quote-left” prefix=”fas”] A People Without Shame is an artistic triumph composed by a master craftsman whose courageous eye makes all too vivid the abundant horrors suffered by beautiful people and their culture at the hands of soul-dead colonizers eager to extinguish them. Patrick Hogan is – as Kurosawa says an artist must be – one who does not look away. Inside this grand and ambitious novel beats an urgent and epic dirge written with magic enough to awaken our collective humanity to the poetry preserved in the raging hearts of people whose stories refuse to die.– Matt Cashion, author of Last Words of the Holy Ghost [icon name=”quote-left” prefix=”fas”] Hogan’s absorbing and stylistically inventive novel offers a stirring meditation on the cost of colonial appropriation. Told with visceral prose and cinematic sweep, it’s also a unique tale of unrequited love. Kehinta, the guardian of her people’s epic poem, is Hogan’s great achievement, magnetic yet always just beyond our grasp, and A’s quest to understand her – to wrest the meaning of a poem from her – brings all the twisted moralities of the colonial enterprise into razor-sharp relief.– Ken Kwapis, director of He’s Just Not That Into You and The Office Reviews and mentions [icon name=”quote-left” prefix=”fas”] I was finally able to give A People Without Shame the careful reading it deserves. It was an experience filled with wonder and beauty.Matt Cashion was right of course in praising the book’s artistry. It reminded me of my second year of college, when I read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury for the first time. It showed me what the novel is capable of artistically. Reading Hogan’s book was the second such experience.Hogan’s ability to weave mythological material into his narrative and to create new myths when need, is truly stunning.Of course, the fate of Somota is a synecdoche for the whole bloody history of colonialism, but Hogan does much more. He manages to give us a detailed treatment of that history in all its complexity and richness.– Robert Treu, Professor, Emeritus of EnglishUniversity of Wisconsin, La Crosse University of Connecticut
