This past weekend, local startup CEO and #GirlBoss Sophie Cone, won the Booker Prize for her incredible 2020 work RE: This Week’s Product Launch, a short email to all fourteen of her startup’s employees.
The Booker Prize committee cited Ms. Cone’s incredible ability to tell a story, while creating an entirely new language in their announcement:
RE: This Week’s Product Launch caused our panel to weep tears of joy at its brilliance. The way Ms. Cone used phrases like close the loop, touchbase and iterative process while insisting her company’s product was “making a difference” led our judges to believe there was no better piece of fiction written this year. She created an entire world and for the brief 47 words of the email, we were transported to another world, a world where nouns are verbs, verbs are nouns and the meaning of specific words change each and every sentence. We believe RE: This Week’s Product Launch was a scathing critique on the concrete nature of definitions. At least we think it was, Ms. Cone may just not know what any of those words mean. Stylistically, her choice to only use lowercase letters made us want to cast aside the oppressive shackles of grammar. Additionally, the brilliance of Ms. Cone’s co-writer to add an afterword, Re: RE: This Week’s Product Launch brought the entire writing to another level rarely visited by the majority of fiction writers we read. The afterword, which featured only abbreviations and emojis was a fantastic look into startup culture in 2020. As a result of all of this, we award Sophie Cone the Booker Prize in Fiction for 2020.
Congratulations Sophie!
HornRimmer 