The Goldsmiths Prize 2024
A lot of my reading this year has taken the form of working through shortlists for various awards. My initial 40-book reading list that began the year in January contained last year's Booker longlist (though I'm yet to finish it); I've read this year's Booker shortlist and am working through the longlist; and I've read most of the nominations for the Ignyte Awards, the Le Guin Prize, and the CWA Dagger (though I read them while on holiday and haven't yet blogged about any of them). Reading awards lists has exposed me to a lot of books I wouldn't otherwise have known about, and I've found some of my favourite reads this year through doing it.
At some point last week I learned about the Goldsmiths Prize, which has been running since 2013 with the aim of celebrating "creative daring". The prize is awarded annually to "a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best".
My Masters degree is in "Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment" and I'm incredibly fond of books that really push at the boundaries of what fiction and the novel as a form can do, so to say that this sounded like exactly my shit would be an understatement. I'm also particularly enamoured with the "Fantasy Prize" page on the site, in which they asked "judges, nominees, winners and friends to select a novel by any British or Irish writer published since 1759 on which they would like, hypothetically, to confer the Goldsmiths Prize in retrospect". I haven't read all of them but those I know are all books that have been very important for me - particularly B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, which had a huge influence on my own work.
The winner of this year's prize is announced on November 6th, just over two weeks from today. The shortlist is only six books and I read two of them last week (blogs to come), so I think I'm going to make an attempt to read the others before the winner is announced. I liked both of the books I've read so far, so if the rest of the list is as strong this may well be one that I add to my planned reading for next year. I'll likely try to read all of the previous winners, too.
Posts for books on this prize will be on the tag #goldsmiths24, and I'll add a section to the Collections page as well.