Hildyard wins £10,000 Encore Award for Emergency 

Daisy Hildyard has won the £10,000 2023 Encore Award for Emergency (Fitzcarraldo Editions).

A "sustained mediation on the potential of our human interconnections with all that surrounds us", Hildyard’s book is described to be "as much a lyrical celebration of life as it is a disquietude and call to action". 

The annual Encore Award celebrates outstanding achievements in second novels. Shortlisted writers all receive a £500 prize.

Hildyard was unable to attend the live event where the prize was announced, but was informed and accepted the award saying: "An award for a second attempt is a kind-hearted award and I am happy and grateful to have been a part of it this year. The other authors on the shortlist are all writers whose work I respect, and I like that the award makes us into a cohort: we’ve written our different books about different things, but we’re together on our second novels at the same moment (even though I reckon I’m the oldest, which means they’re actually one step ahead of me).

"When we are very, very old, on our 75th novels, I hope we’ll still be seeing and reading each other. I’m grateful to my agent David Godwin and to my publisher Fitzcarraldo, which made this book – I just wrote a Word doc – and they’ve cared for it so thoughtfully and generously, before and since its release.

"The prize money will give me time at my desk, it makes a big and real difference. Speaking personally, it meant a lot to me that the judges described Emergency as a celebration of life, an experience of being in the thick of life – thank you for reading the novel and thinking about it like this. And it’s good to think of people feeling that, inside or outside the book."

This year’s judges, Maura Dooley, Daljit Nagra and Nikesh Shukla, commented: "Emergency is a work of great style and substance; contemplative, clever and seductive. Lyrically unfolding its story slowly and delicately through the compelling voice of a narrator brought to a standstill in lockdown, this work reflects on rural life at a point of great change. In contemplating childhood, in her evocation of her schooldays, in the natural world seen through the eyes of a child, Hildyard summons a world just pre-internet, a place in which the edgelands of a rural community struggle as employment slips away.

"In her finely-observed and precise descriptions of the environment Hildyard elides the easy distinctions between the man-made and the natural world, asking the reader to look harder. The reader is invited to consider what the destruction of this interrelated world might mean for us all. This is a powerful pastoral novel written with a watchful, unsparing eye, both praising and exposing the beauty, the ugliness, and the essential interconnectedness of life."

Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow (Vintage), received the Somerset Maugham Award and a "5 under 35" honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay "The Second Body", described as a "brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth," was published in 2017 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Last year’s winner was Francis Spufford, who won the award for Light Perpetual (Faber).