The Goldsmiths Prize has announced its shortlist of cutting-edge contemporary literature after receiving a record number of submissions.
Leading the pack of six authors are the acclaimed “weird fiction” author China Miéville and Booker longlisted sci-fi author Missouri Williams. Two of the shortlisted novelists, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Keith Ridgway, take a sideways look at Ireland. Completing the shortlist are fiction debuts from the award-winning translator Polly Barton and Granta editorial assistant Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo.
The £10,000 award, run in association with the New Statesman, celebrates fiction from Britain and Ireland that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”.
All of the novels on the list offer a glimpse of the inner workings of the narrator’s minds while tackling themes of reinvention, love, grief and ghosts of the past.
“The Goldsmiths Prize exists to remind us that the novel, as the name suggests, is new. It may be three hundred years old, but in adventurous hands, it still has limitless possibilities as a form,” said Francis Spufford, chair of judges and professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University. He is joined on the jury by writer and translator Kate Briggs, novelist Hari Kunzru, and the former Evening Standard literary editor and current film critic for the New Statesman David Sexton.
China Miéville, a Sunday Times bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction, appears on the shortlist with The Rouse, a story that blends contemporary and historical narratives as two unlikely characters share the same obsessions. It has been described as “a monumental work” by Kunzru which serves as “a reminder that the novel is capable of containing multitudes.”
Missouri Williams’s second novel The Vivisectors, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize this year, has also made it to the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. It is set in a crumbling university overrun by vegetation as academics and rogue gardeners battle for power. This investigation-turned-love-story is a “singularly strange, ambitious and brilliant” narrative of contaminated politics and rotten institutions.
In Said the Dead, one of the two Irish books on the shortlist, Doireann Ní Ghríofa portrays a Victorian mental hospital in Cork, its history – and the residents who continue to haunt its halls. Said the Dead serves as a reminder “that fiction has an ethical purpose as well as an aesthetic one,” the judges noted.
Keith Ridgway, called “one of Ireland’s best writers” by the Times, has also written a novel marked by its Irish sense of place and history. The protagonist of Dooneen steps through the bushes in a London park only to find himself in Dublin – but not as we know it. The city is in a state of revolution, where the footpaths move and everything seems odd. Dooneen is not only a narrative of a city under siege, but also, Kate Briggs notes, one of separation.
In What Am I, A Deer?, Polly Barton, a translator best known for rendering Japanese novels into English including Butter by Asako Yuzuki, meditates on the nature of romantic hyper-fixation. A young woman, the novel’s unnamed narrator, takes up a job in a famous gaming company in Frankfurt. During her commute, a moment of kindness from a stranger turns into a year-long whirlwind obsession. The novel is described by Spufford as a “lucid tracing of the very fabric texture of [the narrator’s] thinking” which “extends the great modernist experiments in charting minds in motion.”
Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo appears on the list with her first book Attention-Seeking Behaviour. The narrator of Varfis-van Warmelo’s novel is an oversharer – and a compulsive liar. Sexton calls it a “remarkably accomplished debut”, one the blends fiction and non-fiction while exploring the proximity of literature with the art of lying.
The Goldsmith’s Prize has been won by debut novels twice before: Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won the inaugural prize in 2013, and poet Robin Robertson’s verse novel The Long Take in 2018.
Co-founded by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman in 2013, the prize is awarded annually to a ground-breaking novel by a British or Irish writer. Former winners of the prize include Ali Smith, Kevin Barry and Nicola Barker.
The winner will be announced on 4 November in London at a ceremony at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, WC2N.
The shortlist:
· What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
· The Rouse by China Miéville (Pan Macmillan)
· Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Faber&Faber)
· Dooneen by Keith Ridgway (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
· Attention Seeking Behaviour by Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo (Peninsula Press)
· The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (Harper Collins)
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