Patricia Nell Warren to Finish Front Runner's Race

Press Release

Patricia Nell Warren, author of the most popular gay sports novel of all time, The Front Runner, will memorialize an event in her novel by “running” the final one hundred meters of the 1st World Outgames Montreal 5000-meter race on Wednesday, 2 August 2, 9:00, at the Complexe sportif Claude-Robillard.

The 70 year old Warren has been granted the honor of being the first person to cross the finish line in honor of her novel’s fictional character, U.S. distance runner Billy Sive, who (in the book) is killed before completing the 5000-meter at the ‘76 Montréal Olympics.

Warren will also make her first-ever Montréal literary appearance with a booksigning at the Official Outgames Boutique, Sainte-Catherine East at the corner of Wolfe, Thursday, 3 August, 14:00 – 15:30. She will speak about sports activism with her loyal fans, who can learn what motivates her and why she fights for human rights in sports.

Warren’s 1974 ground-breaking saga about an ex-Marine track coach who falls in love with his top male athlete captivated both gay and straight readers all over the world, becoming the first contemporary gay novel to make The New York Times Bestseller List. In three decades, Warren’s landmark novel has sold more than ten million copies, been translated into ten languages, and is considered to be among the most influential novels of the post-Stonewall era.

Warren, a former marathon runner, was one of the 12 women who crashed the 1969 Boston Marathon, at a time when U.S. women runners were prohibited from competing at distances farther than 2.5 miles. She went on to serve as publicity director for the first two New York City marathons. Given these rich personal experiences in the running world, Warren was prompted to write the first book that focused on a gay runner's attempt to make the U.S. Olympic team and his love relationship with his coach.

In 1993 Warren teamed up with veteran media specialist Tyler St. Mark to start an independent publishing imprint, Wildcat Press. She is one of a very few women publishers in a corporate and mostly male-dominated book industry. Wildcat has all her book titles in print.

Warren was born in 1936 and grew up on the Grant-Kohrs cattle ranch (now a national historic site) at Deer Lodge, MT. Though the third generation of her family to live on there, she elected not to go into ranching. But the rugged cowboy independence of her childhood has stayed with her through seven decades, marking her writing and political activities. She has been publishing professionally since 1954 and her late teens.

Graduating from Manhattanville College in 1957, Warren went to work in publishing. For 21 years (1959-1980) she was a Reader’s Digest editor for the magazine as well as the Condensed Book Club. For a time in the 1960s, Warren was in and out of Spain, as a liaison between the Digest and the Spanish edition of RD, assisting with development of Spanish-language article and book ideas. She left RD in 1980 to be self-supporting as a writer.

Since 1974, Warren has published six more novels, distinguishing herself as a literary maverick often exploring daring and sometimes unpopular themes. Her subsequent novels about the gay experience – the Front Runner sequels Harlan’s Race and Billy’s Boy, as well as The Fancy Dancer, The Beauty Queen and The Wild Man -- have made her one of the most popular authors of gay and lesbian literature, yet she remains controversial among some gay critics because of her outspoken views which often go against traditional gay thinking. With most of these novels also translated into other languages, Warren has a worldwide popularity.

Among her many accolades and honors are the Barry Goldwater Award given by the Arizona Human Rights Fund, the 1982 National Cowboy Hall of Fame’s Western Heritage Award, the Gay and Lesbian Literary Hall of Fame, a 1996 Lambda Literary Award and the Saints & Sinners Hall of Fame.