The Goldsmiths Prize 2024
Yesterday Rachel Cusk's Parade was announced as the winner of this year's Goldsmiths Prize. Dr Abigail Shin, Chair of Judges for the prize, had this to say about it:
Examining the life of the artist and the composition of the self, Rachel Cusk’s Parade exposes the power and limitations of our alternate selves. Probing the limits of the novel form and pushing back against convention, this is a work that resets our understanding of what the long form makes possible.
At the time of writing this I've only read half of the shortlist, with Mark Bowles' All My Precious Madness, Jonathan Buckley's Tell, and Han Smith's Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking left to read, so I'm objectively not qualified to have an opinion about this choice, but I think it's an interesting one. I liked Parade but ultimately didn't think it felt like anything I hadn't seen before, and it certainly didn't "reset [my] understanding of what the long form makes possible". Of the three books I've read from the shortlist I think the one that that term could most accurately be applied to would be Lara Pawson's Spent Light.
I'm very interested to read the rest of the shortlist now and see how I feel about them, and how I feel about this choice of a winner once I have the full context of the list.