[1] 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.
[6] The resulting book, a "stylized contemporary noir" titled Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, was published by McSweeney's in 2017.
[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".