Colwill Brown is one of the four first-time novelists on this year’s Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. She was born and raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire before heading over to the US where she studied English literature and then creative writing. She is an author of short stories, most notably You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle, which won the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award.
Brown’s debut novel, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, builds on her award-winning short story. Uniquely written in the South Yorkshire dialect, the novel traces the lives of three “Donny lasses” growing up in the Nineties. Rach, Shaz and Kel’s stories are painted in emotive and humorous vignettes shifting in perspective, location and timeframe with one continuous thread: a long-festering secret that threatens to destroy their friendship.
Zuzanna Lachendro: The Goldsmiths Prize was set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. What can an “innovative” approach offer the reader (and writer) that a more conventional novel might not?
Colwill Brown: I didn’t set out to write something innovative, exactly, but if I was only trying to follow convention I think I’d have quit years ago. Who can be arsed to write a book that already exists? As a reader, a novel novel generally offers me delight, envy, hope, and an urgent need to get back to my own writing. More broadly, novels offer us a way of sliding inside the consciousnesses of other beings, a kind of magic I haven’t experienced through any other art form. A good novel offers temporary relief from our inherent, unbreachable loneliness. It deepens our sense of connection to the world, our knowledge of ourselves and others, our understanding of what it means to be alive. In this way, the novel form extends the possibilities of reality. So a novel that extends the possibilities of a form that extends the possibilities of reality? What kind of magic is that?
Tell me about a piece of art, literature or music that was important to you when writing this book.
So much music, some of which I’ve written about elsewhere, either kept me company during the writing or became part of the process; I’d turn to particular tracks whenever I needed to tap into nostalgia, memory, atmosphere, sensation. The glorious, unassailable “Children of the Night” by Nakatomi always transported me to the sweaty, smoke machine hazy, Cheesy Wotsits dusted discos of my Nineties childhood.
What inspired you to write We Pretty Pieces of Flesh in a South Yorkshire dialect?
The people of South Yorkshire. There’s poetry in the way we speak. It never occurred to me to flatten that poetry, “standardise” it. I don’t see how I could have ignored those distinct rhythms, written in a cadence that doesn’t belong to those particular characters, that particular time and place.
“You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle” is both the name of one of the chapters in your book and the title of your short story that won the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award. Talk me through the process of the novel coming together. Did it start off as a short story?
I was trying to teach myself how to write short stories, see if I could figure out what a story is made of. It began with Kel skiving school, sat outside the chippy on the kerb, waiting for Ando to show up so they could have sex in the bushes. This failed as a story and sat untouched for a long time, until I realised it was the end of Kel and Ando’s love affair, not the beginning. Next, I wanted to meet Kel’s mates, so I wrote a story called “Knickers” about the three of them trying to get into Karisma nightclub at the age of eleven and Kel really needing a wee. Since Kel’s mate Shaz seemed like the group’s natural leader, I tried to get to know her better by drafting “You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle.” I just kept going like that, following the strands of one story into the next. When the book started insisting on itself as a novel, I insisted in return that its sections remain capable of standing alone; that way, I didn’t have to admit that I still didn’t know what a short story was. In revision, I had to preserve each chapter’s independence whilst convincing them to pull together, interlock.
Each chapter is written from a different perspective, be it in the first person from Rach’s point of view, second person from Shaz’s, or third person in the chapters dedicated to Kel. What was behind this choice?
Again, in the beginning I was just trying to extend my skill range, teach myself new techniques. I experimented with first, second, omniscient, and first-plural points of view because I’d only ever written in third, which meant I was defaulting to the only mode I felt comfortable with, rather than thinking critically about which tool was best for the job. Eventually I got a feel for the narrative possibilties offered by each choice, what each could reveal – or access – about character. Rach, Kel, and Shaz’s personalities evolved alongside these experiments, influencing and being influenced by these technical decisions.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh reads both as a love letter to Doncaster and a way of pointing out its worst qualities, especially in the first half of the novel. What were your intentions of writing the novel this way?
I had no intentions of portraying Donny as either “good” or “bad.” My only conscious hope was that people from there could read the book and think, “Yeah, sounds like the Donny I know.” Places like Doncaster tend to have their complexities wrung out of them by reductive “it’s grim up North” narratives. I wasn’t about to shy away from “grim” things just to avoid this stereotype; romanticising a place is only another way to diminish it. I wrote in full awareness that there is still a dearth of nuanced storytelling about the North, though this is changing somewhat, and that this novel would, therefore, have to carry more than its fair share of the weight of representation.
Are there any elements of the book that were inspired by real life events?
Yes.
Tell me about the relationship between Rach and Shaz. Their feelings towards one another are constantly in flux. But there is something else there beneath the friendly rivalry and jealousy.
Rivalry and jealousy, yes. Deep admiration, love. Plus I reckon they fancy each other. At least, that’s the feeling I held close while I was writing them. (Honestly, I thought it was obvious that they fancy each other, but so far no-one’s really mentioned it.)
Why do we need the Goldsmiths Prize?
Well, I need it for the clout and the cash. But why does everyone else need it? In its inaugural year, the prize was awarded to one of my favourite novels of all time, which, famously, was rejected for nine years before finding a publisher. The prizes it went on to win helped that novel find a wide, international audience who otherwise might never have known it existed. I think often about the brilliant, paradigm-shifting novels that don’t find a publisher, that aren’t lifted into public awareness by prizes like this, and that we won’t have the pleasure and privilege of being thrilled, disturbed, and changed by.
What past British or Irish novel deserves a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize? Why?
In grad school I had to write an essay on Beckett’s Molloy. Besides finishing a novel, it’s the most intellectually challenging feat I’ve ever undertaken. As the semester progressed, those of us in the Beckett class began to resemble Beckett characters, increasingly haggard and dishevelled, exhausted by our attempts to make “sense” of his work. We’d occasionally catch each other’s eye in the corridors of the English department, exchange looks of haunted recognition. Molloy resists interpretation like no other novel I’ve read. Each time I thought I had apprehended it, the novel shifted from my grasp, revealed another facet of itself that defied my too-neat sense-making. It felt like my first true encounter with genius.
“We Pretty Pieces of Flesh” by Colwill Brown is published by Chatto & Windus. The winner of the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize is announced on 5 November. Read more interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
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