
The novelists Mark Haddon and Megan Nolan have been announced as judges for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize. The annual £10,000 award, which runs in collaboration with the New Statesman, celebrates fiction that “breaks the mould, opens up new possibilities for the novel form, and embodies the spirit of invention”.
Haddon, whose novel The Porpoise was nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, is an English writer and illustrator based in Oxford. He is best known for his mystery novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize.
Nolan is an Irish author and New Statesman writer based in New York. Her debut novel Acts of Desperation earned praise from an array of readers including Marian Keyes and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Her second, Ordinary Human Failings, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2024.
The fiction writer and essayist, Simon Okotie joins them on the panel. Okotie is the author of the Absalon trilogy of novels and the forthcoming book-length essay The Future of the Novel. The panel will be chaired by Amy Sackville, the senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths and author of three novels, including The Still Point, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2010.
The winner of last year’s Goldsmiths Prize was Parade by Rachel Cusk, which the judges described as a “ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment”. Previous winners include Ali Smith, Isabel Waidner, Lucy Ellmann and Kevin Barry.
This year’s prize opens for submissions on 22 January 2025 and the winner will be announced in November.
[See also: Why Rachel Cusk won the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction]