A bildungsroman, a story within a story and two novels set across a single day feature in the six-book shortlist for this year’s Goldsmiths prize.
The award, which celebrates “fiction that breaks the mould”, carries a prize of £10,000. This year’s shortlist, selected from 107 books, “shows the novel – that most slippery and vital of forms – continuing to morph and reinvent itself in ways that surprise and delight us,” said Dr Tom Lee, judging chair and lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Lori & Joe by Amy Arnold
The Long Form by Kate Briggs
Never Was by Gareth H Gavin
Man Eating Typewriter by Richard Milward
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers
The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell
Adam Thirlwell is shortlisted for The Future Future, a novel set in 18th-century Paris about a woman, Celine, who is the subject of lewd rumours. “Thirlwell’s prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful,” wrote Mark O’Connell in his Guardian review. Prize judge and author Helen Oyeyemi said: “The perspective unfolds like a map and turns as a globe turns, drawing the reader into finely etched pursuit of a protagonist’s almost subliminal secret: self possession that’s contemporaneous with fulfilling the claims of an era.”
The Long Form by Kate Briggs also made the shortlist. The novel narrates a day in the life of a mother and newborn baby while considering the novel as a form, creating a “meta-commentary on the book’s own progression,” wrote Jo Hamya in the Guardian. Judge and author Maddie Mortimer said The Long Form is an “exquisite study of care and attention” and a “quietly radical masterpiece”.
Another shortlisted novel set across a single day is Lori & Joe by Amy Arnold, which begins when Lori finds Joe dead while bringing him his morning coffee. “At first a seemingly quiet and meditative novel, the story that unfolds is anything but quiet – an unforgettable and devastating portrait of regret, secrets and harm amid a landscape of haunting beauty,” said Lee.
In H Gareth Gavin’s Never Was, Daniel tells the story of their childhood in a small salt-mining town before its collapse. Gavin “boldly merges a story of catastrophe in a northern English town with a tale of drug-addled hedonism in a fantasy land,” said judge Ellen Peirson-Hagger, assistant culture editor at the New Statesman, the prize’s partner. “Never Was is a great trans novel, queering and querying expectations of character, type and truth itself.”
Cuddy by Benjamin Myers is also shortlisted for the prize. In it, Myers combines prose, poetry, play, diary and real historical events to tell the story of St Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the north of England. Myers’ “experience as a writer shows in his elliptical approach to history and those who make it, and his willingness to take on complex material that retains its mystery even as it compels further discussion,” wrote Nina Allan in her Guardian review. Oyeyemi added that the book is “part poetry, part electricity” and “carries relics between the ephemeral and the eternal with all the disarming vitality of a truly illuminated text”.
The final shortlisted book is Man-Eating Typewriter by Richard Milward. Framed as a novel within a novel, the book contains the memoirs of an anarchist who plans to commit a “fantabulosa crime”. “The linguistic invention borders on the dazzling, the potted social history drops its names with wit and verve, and the whole thing is both laugh-out-loud funny and authentically disgusting,” wrote Neil Bartlett in the Guardian. Mortimer called the novel an “extraordinary technical feat” and a “very rare beast of a book”.
The winner will be announced on 8 November. Previous winners include Eimear McBride, Isabel Waidner and Ali Smith. In 2022, Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams became the first collaborative authors to win the prize with their novel Diego Garcia.
