CD Rose has won the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize for his novel We Live Here Now. The prize, for fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the form” and sees the author win £10,000, was awarded on 5 November at a ceremony in London.
The Goldsmiths Prize sets a high bar. In highlighting innovative fiction, it risks being misrepresented as rewarding rule-breaking – or of simply playing by its own alternative set of rules. Yet the prize also reminds us of what this literary form has always done: call into question literary mechanisms and methods and, in so doing, shed light on our contemporary lived experience.
The distinction between short- and long-form fiction is a convention the novel is well-placed to challenge. This year’s Goldsmiths Prize-winner uses a series of linked short stories to undermine both the traditional workings of novelistic plot and the ontological status of the fictional characters that are supposedly “developed” by it. In the process it traces the invisible circuits and networks – of art, capital and war – that shape our lives.
We Live Here Now explores the repercussions of a fictional art installation of the same name by Sigismunda (“Sigi”) Conrad on the lives of 12 people associated with the project. One of these characters is the Neapolitan Oreste Lauro, who was Conrad’s chief “fixer, finder, sourcer, the man who brought things to her, the man who found what was needed”. The materials sourced are indicative of the dizzying, encyclopaedic nature of Sigi’s (and Rose’s) work, “with comparisons to Rachel Whiteread, Mike Nelson and Ilya Kabakov abounding”: late 1960s Gio Ponti kitchen tiles, coral jewellery, 1900s sheet music, 18th-century silhouettes. “She asked if I knew someone who could make pinhole cameras, or bind books using 16th-century techniques, or recreate the smell of autumn. I usually did. She paid well.”
The novel opens with a fictional “article” by the character Che Horst-Prosier, a cultural critic, with Lauro as his main interlocutor and source of information. The latter recounts how Sigi was “always a step away. Never quite there, never quite with you,” a condition that progressively infects those associated with her in the aftermath of the installation. Indeed when Horst-Prosier subsequently tries to corroborate his conversation with Lauro, he finds that the latter’s phone is no longer working and that “no one in the bar where we’d met had any recollection of the man”.
The book traces the trajectories of characters whose ontological status continually flickers between presence and absence, like dying (or even long-dead) stars. Rose categorises it as a “constellation novel” – a form in which causality yields to a looser relationship (as Adam Mars-Jones says of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights). Rather than Tokarczuk’s more precise formulations – which Mars-Jones likens to an orrery – Rose’s work hangs together through texture, atmosphere and resonance. To paraphrase part of a conversation between two characters attempting to make a film on an Outer Hebridean island:
“You want to turn this into a thriller?”
“There’s no tension, no conflict.”
“I’m not interested in tension and conflict. I want texture, atmosphere, suggestion. This is experiential.”
We eventually learn of Lauro’s fate in the chapter entitled “Death #47”. (Although he will reappear, along with the other characters, in a final apocalyptic bacchanal, prior to Horst-Prosier’s report on Sigi’s “comeback” exhibition, which concludes: “Everything is connected, we tell ourselves, and nothing ever dies.”) Though acknowledging that others might categorise the preceding 46 incidents as non-fatal “accidents or misfortunes” – drug overdoses, heart attacks, car accidents and the like – Oreste himself is determined to register each of these “grave mishaps” as a death. Convinced that the next such incident is imminent and that it will be perpetrated by debt-collectors from a project he’d invested in (with money he didn’t have), he wonders whether he will finally find out what it was that the man who negotiated his involvement was hiding, the “something, somewhere in his past or present, that he wasn’t going to be keen on talking about”. The secret remains, however, beyond Lauro’s demise as “one of the many mysteries which lurked in the corners of his various lives”. We Live Here Now emerged similarly mysteriously, flying steadily and consistently under the radar before assuming its rightful place as the winner of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize.
Read interviews with the shortlisted writers here.
[Futher reading: CD Rose: “Novels are like massive clouds which lower overhead”]
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