Foulds wins Encore Prize

Adam Foulds’ Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Quickening Maze (Cape) has won the Encore Award for the best second novel of 2009 and 2010.

Ali Smith, who won in 2002 for her novel Hotel World, presented Foulds with the £10,000 prize at a ceremony last night (10th May) in central London.

The judges for the 2011 award, Alex Clark, Lindsay Duguid and Peter Parker, described The Quickening Maze as "a confident, beautifully written historical novel, seamed with poetry and intense descriptions of the natural world, which unobtrusively deploys its documentary underpinnings".

Also shorlisted were: Charles Chadwick for A Chance Acquaintance (Short Books), Georgina Harding for The Spy Game (Bloomsbury), Christopher Nicholson for The Elephant Keeper (Fourth Estate), Monique Roffey for The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (S&S) and Adam Thirlwell’s The Escape (Cape).