Photo by Tom Turner

The Goldsmiths Prize has announced its much-anticipated shortlist of six works of fiction judged to be at the cutting-edge of contemporary literature. Among them are Four debut novels written by authors who have moved into fiction from diverse backgrounds in other genres: poetry, memoir, journalism and the short story. 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”.

The books are:

• We Pretty Pieces of Fleshby Colwill Brown(Chatto & Windus)
• The Catchby Yrsa Daley-Ward (Merky Books)
• Helmby Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)
• The Expansion Project by Ben Pester (Granta)
• Nova Scotia Houseby Charlie Porter (Particular Books)
• We Live Here NowC. D. Rose (Melville House) “These books in their very different ways take full advantage of the form’s resources and possibilities, bringing to the page startling, refreshing, unsettling ways of thinking and feeling,” said Amy Sackville, the chair of judges and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University

Joining Sackville on the judging panel are Mark Haddon, best known for the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, who was formerly shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, Simon Okotie, an essayist and fiction writer known for his Absalon trilogy and, representing the New Statesman, Megan Nolan, a New York-based Irish novelist whose debut novel Acts of Desperation earned praise from the likes of Marian Keyes and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Having published four of the six books chosen, Penguin Random House imprints dominate this year’s list – as they have this year’s Booker shortlist. The four first-time novelists on the shortlist are: Colwill Brown, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Charlie Porter and Ben Pester. The 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.

Doncaster-born Colwill Brown’s debut We Pretty Pieces of Flesh – described as “electrifying” and “very hard to put down” by Haddon – follows three best friends, Rach, Shaz and Kel, living in Doncaster as they come of age. The novel is written in “a new and utterly distinctive female voice”, describing episodes from the friends’ lives, from blagging their way into nightclubs to trips to the Family Planning clinic when their periods are late. As the girls grow up and find themselves at a crossroads – staying behind or going to university – a long-festering secret threatens to shake the foundations of their friendship. Brown’s short story You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle, published earlier this year has just won the BBC National Short Story Award.

Another debut, The Catch, by the PEN Ackerley Prize-winning memoirist, poet and actress Yrsa Daley-Ward is by turns popular fiction, literary fiction and science fiction – “an extraordinary shape-shifting, genre defying work,” Okotie says. It tellsthe story of twin sisters whose dead mother, thought to have vanished in the Thames, mysteriously reappears. Is this their mother, or an alternate version of her that somehow made it to their timeline? In what the judges call her “riveting first foray into fiction” Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood, while exploring the sacrifices black women must make to fulfil their potential.

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The Expansion Project – a “magnificently destabilising rendering of work-life which is both familiar and totally foreign”, in the words of Megan Nolan – follows Ben Pester’s short story collection Am I in the Right Place?(2021). A mid-level employee, Tom Crowley loses his eight-year-old child during the “bring-your-daughter-to-work day”. But was she ever really there? None of Tom’s colleagues are aware of “bring-your-daughter-to-work day” as they are lost in a story where “boundaries between the real and the mediated, the father and the man, the worker and the person, all begin to warp and bleed.”

The final first-time novelist on the list, Charlie Porter, reputed to be one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time, has written widely for the Financial Times, The New York Times and the Guardian and published two works of non-fiction. His first novel Nova Scotia House grapples with a love story between two men: a teenage volunteer, Johnny, and gardener Jerry at the height of the Aids pandemic in London. It is written “from a deeply embodied stream-of-consciousness,” Sackville says. “The ‘queer magic’ of its composition runs through every aspect, from voice to characterisation to story to form.” In her review for The NewStatesman, Alice Vincent described the book as a “a pleasing celebration of how gardening, queer lives and the Aids crisis intertwined.”

The most established author on the shortlist is Sarah Hall , a two-time Man Booker Prize nominee and the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice. Helm, her seventh novel, is an “absolute tour de force,” says Haddon. It follows Helm, the only named wind in the British Isles, across millennia right up until the current day, as observed by scientist Dr Selima Sutar, fearing the end is near. The novel is an “interwoven braid of narratives”, at times theological, funny or sinister yet also “relentlessly inventive and always entertaining.”

Described by the judges as “a dizzying, encyclopaedic series of stories linked by texture, resonance and suggestion”, We Live Here Now is CD Rose’s fifth novel. The lives of the twelve people involved in an art installation project are changed when visitors start disappearing mysteriously. The disappearances set the group of twelve off on a journey that will end with them all together at the final apocalyptic bacchanal. We Live Here Now “traces the invisible circuits and networks – of love, capital and war – that shape our contemporary lived experience,” Okotie says.

The Goldsmiths Prize, co-founded by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman in 2013, 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 of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize will be announced on 5 November in London at a ceremony at Foyles bookshop, London.

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