Cottrell was born in South Korea in 1981 and was adopted, along with two biologically unrelated younger Korean boys, into a family from the Midwestern United States.[2] He was raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee.[3]
Cottrell started his first novel in his early thirties.[4] In 2012 he received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[5] After moving from New York to Los Angeles, he completed the novel in 2016.[6] The resulting book, a "stylized contemporary noir" titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney's in 2017.[7] Cottrell has called the book "an anti-memoir".[8] It tells the story of Helen, a woman adopted from Korea at a young age, who returns to her adoptive parents' home in Milwaukee after her adoptive brother's suicide.[9] Writing for The Rumpus, Liza St. James called the book "marvelously interior" and praised the writing as "discursive and associative and gripping all at once".[10]The Guardian called the book "electrifying in its freshness"[11] and the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a strange and lovely thing".[12]Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won a National Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best First Book in the Fiction category.[13] It also won Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction.[14]
In 2018 Cottrell received the Whiting Award in fiction, which is given to promising writers in the early stages of their careers.[15][16] The selection committee said that his writing "opens up fresh lines of questioning in the old interrogations of identity".[3]
