Greengrass, Spufford and Hall shortlisted for £10k RSL Encore Award

Jessie Greengrass, Francis Spufford and Steven Hall are among those shortlisted for the £10,000 RSL Encore Award for the best second novel of the year. 

This year’s prize is judged by Sian Cain, Nikesh Shukla and Paul Muldoon. 

Greengrass is nominated for The High House (Swift Press), set in a flooded England in the near future. Judges said: “This is a novel that confronts our collective failure to act in the face of the greatest existential crisis humanity has ever seen: the climate crisis. But with such bleak subject matter, Greengrass shows how moments of joy and love can still be found despite such terror, in this understatedly powerful novel.” 

Spufford is in contention for Light Perpetual (Faber & Faber), which imagines alternative histories for a group of children who were victims of a V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths in 1944. It has been praised as a “triumph” by judges, who said “this version of ‘what might have been’ affords us memorable and moving insights into what we have come to think of as our own reality”.

Hall is also up for the award with Maxwell’s Demon (Canongate), published 14 years after his debut The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate). Judges said it is “a dizzying experience that toys with its own existence and blurs the lines between creator and creation” and described it as “truly exhilarating to the last pages”. 

Sarvat Hasin’s The Giant Dark (Little, Brown) is also vying for the award. It is a contemporary retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice praised by judges as “a confident, lyrical, sometimes surreal and original novel”. Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road (Bloomsbury) completes the shortlist. It has been described as a blend of a “taut thriller and road trip saga” written “with grace and humanity”.   

The judges said: “To write a novel and see it published in normal times is a feat; to do so during a global pandemic is truly worth celebrating. It is a testament to the skill of all five nominated writers that this year’s shortlist is so strong, all bold and tender in the ways they examine the forces that shape us all – war, trauma, climate change, love. We were moved and thrilled by all of these books and hope readers will be, too.” 

Previous recipients of the award have included Sally Rooney, Ali Smith, Sunjeev Sahota, Neil Mukherjee, Colm Tóibín, and last year’s winner Caoilinn Hughes.  

The winner will be announced on 24th May.