Rachel Cusk, Neel Mukherjee and Jonathan Buckley have been shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths prize, which aims to recognise fiction that “extends the possibilities of the novel form”.
Half of this year’s list is made up of debut novelists, with books by Lara Pawson, Mark Bowles and Han Smith completing the list.
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles (Galley Beggar)
Tell by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo)
Parade by Rachel Cusk (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)
The six shortlisted titles “ask uncomfortable questions while nonetheless finding exuberance and joy in a form that makes such questioning both possible and pleasurable: the novel at its most novel”, said Abigail Shinn, Goldsmiths lecturer and judging chair.
Cusk was shortlisted for Parade, which weaves the stories of four different artists who are all called “G”. She “challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art, and of how each can exist alongside the ordinariness of life”, said author and judge Sara Baume.
Mukherjee made the list for his novel Choice, which he has described as a triptych for its three narratives about various ethical and political dilemmas. The novel “rouses our moral intuitions from privileged slumber and spurs us not to action, but to intricate contemplation of what actions mean,” wrote Tanjil Rashid in his Guardian review.
Buckley was shortlisted for his 12th novel Tell, which is formatted as transcriptions of interviews with a gardener who worked for a wealthy businessman who has gone missing. “Buckley has once again staged an absorbing debate: a philosophical refusal of narrative linearity that is replete with stories; a constellation of episodes that does not tell the whole tale,” wrote Guardian reviewer Richard Robinson.
Pawson’s debut novel, Spent Light, blends memoir, fiction and history. “With a remorseless attention to detail Pawson encounters familiar objects and excavates from each a portal to the past, or to a distant corner of the world, or to the shadows of the narrator’s complex mind,” said Baume.
Smith’s Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is composed of 77 “portraits”, while Bowles’ All My Precious Madness is narrated by a man trying to write a memoir in a cafe who is distracted by a digital entrepreneur talking loudly on the phone at a nearby table.
Joining Shinn and Baume on the judging panel are writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo and journalist Lola Seaton. The prize, worth £10,000 and run in association with the New Statesman, was open to novels published between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, written in English by citizens of the UK or Ireland, or authors who have been resident in either country for three years and have their book published there.
The winner will be announced on 6 November. Previous winners include Eimear McBride, Isabel Waidner and Ali Smith. In 2023, Benjamin Myers won the prize for his novel Cuddy.
