Bren McClain

Bren McClain’s critically acclaimed debut novel, One Good Mama Bone, from Pat Conroy’s Story River Books, has been described as “Charlotte’s Web for grown-ups.” Most recently, the novel has been selected as Melissa Gilbert’s (“Little House on the Prairie”) August 2024 “Book of the Month.” It won the 2017 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and the 2018 Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature. It was also named Pulpwood Queen 2017 Book of the Year, a 2017 Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association, a Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA) Okra pick, longlisted for SIBA’s Southern Book Prize and a finalist for the 2018 Crook’s Corner Prize. Bren also is a contributing essayist in Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy. The novel also claims international in its credits with its publication in France, where it was retitled Mama Red and selected for the 2021 Prix Maya (France’s Animal Welfare Literary Award).

Bren has just completed her next novel, tentatively titled THE MIRACLE OF EULA BATES, which is set in South Carolina and inspired by a woman, who, in 1951, defied the federal government and refused to give a right-of-way to run a four-lane blacktop through her farm. The story is set against the backdrop of our country’s largest use of eminent domain in a time of peace, the building of the Savannah River Plant to manufacture the materials for the hydrogen bomb to go up against the Russians in the Cold War. An early excerpt won the gold medal for the William Faulkner Novel-in-Progress prize. Bren makes her home in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.