Three debut novels are among the six works shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. The £10,000 award, run in association with the New Statesman, celebrates fiction from Britain and Ireland that “breaks the mould and extends the possibilities of the novel form”. The books are:
- All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles (Galley Beggar)
- Tell by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo)
- Parade by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber)
- Choice by Neel Mukherjee (Atlantic)
- Spent Light by Lara Pawson (CB Editions)
- Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith (John Murray)
“Wildly different and yet unified by a restless curiosity about form, the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize 2024 demonstrates how the novel never stays still, always searching for new ways to tell stories that matter,” said Abigail Shinn, the chair of judges and lecturer in early modern literature at Goldsmiths University. Joining Shinn on the judging panel are Sara Baume, author of three novels – two of which were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize – Xiaolu Guo, memoirist, novelist and film-maker whose work has been shortlisted for both the Goldsmiths and Orwell Prizes, and Lola Seaton, associate editor at New Left Review and New Statesman contributing writer.
Independent imprints dominate this year’s list, having published five of the six books chosen – a contrast to this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, which includes one novel published by an independent press. The Goldsmiths shortlist features three first-time novelists: Mark Bowles, Han Smith and Lara Pawson. The prize has been won by debut novels twice before: in its first year in 2013 by Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed thing, and in 2018 by the poet Robin Robertson’s verse novel The Long Take.
In Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness – described as a “exhilaratingly intelligent, hilariously foul-mouthed monologue” by Seaton – the protagonist, Henry Nash, is unable to escape his anger and disappointment at the world. Henry is hauled out of his working-class childhood through an undergraduate degree at Oxford and into adulthood as part of an academic elite all while trying to distance himself from his violent past.
Lara Pawson’s Spent Light draws on memoir and history in a hybrid work of fiction, as a woman contemplates the objects in her house and teases out their often-violent associations. Pawson is a former BBC World Service journalist, whose investigation into Angola’s forgotten massacre was longlisted for the Orwell Book Prize in 2015. The Goldsmiths judges said her new book balances “horror, humour, and incredible tenderness” with a “remorseless attention to detail”.
The list’s third debut, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by the queer writer, translator and adult literacy teacher, Han Smith, follows a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past. Described as a “hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure” by Shinn, the novel explores how language is shaped by ideology.
Jonathan Buckley’s twelfth novel, Tell, homes in on the divisions between social classes. An investigation is launched into the mysterious disappearance of Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, in a work that examines the ways in which we make stories of our lives and those of others. Guo praised Buckley’s book as a “relentlessly truthful and absorbing tale”.
Rachel Cusk is also nominated for her twelfth novel: the author of the Outline trilogy reappears on the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist for the fourth time with Parade. From an artist who begins to paint upside down to a man falling to his death, Cusk’s novel is described by her publisher as “[setting] loose a carousel of lives”. Encompassing family, morality and gender, the book “embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment”, said Baume.
Choice, by the Booker-shortlisted author Neel Mukherjee is described by its publisher as a novel of “freedom, responsibility, and ethics”. Following three linked narratives – a publisher at war with his industry and himself, an academic who encounters a stranger after an accident, and a family in rural India whose lives are destroyed by a gift – Choice is “a truly ambitious and compelling fiction from an author at the height of his powers” according to the Goldsmiths judges.
The Goldsmiths Prize, co-founded by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman in 2013, is awarded annually to a groundbreaking novel by a British or Irish writer. Former winners of the prize include Ali Smith, Kevin Barry and Nicola Barker. The winner of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize will be announced on 6 November in London at a ceremony at Foyles, Charing Cross Road.
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