Waidner wins £10k Goldsmiths Prize with Sterling Karat Gold

Isabel Waidner has won the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize for their "mind-bending" novel Sterling Karat Gold, published by indie Peninsula Press. 

Waidner was announced as the winner of the prize, which rewards mould-breaking "fiction at its most novel", at an online ceremony on 10th November.

Sterling Karat Gold is the third novel by the writer, critical theorist and creative writing lecturer and the second of Waidner’s books to be shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, following We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (Dostoyevsky Wannabe) in 2019.

The novel is described by its publisher as: "Kafka’s The Trial written for the era of gaslighting. A surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and Black bodies." It follows main character Sterling, who is arrested one morning having done nothing wrong and is "plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world". Sterling, with the help of their three best friends, must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships to exonerate themselves and hold the powers that be to account.

Waidner beat off competition from shortlistees Claire-Louise Bennett with Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape), Natasha Brown's Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), Keith Ridgway's A Shock (Picador), Leone Ross with This One Sky Day (Faber) and Rebecca Watson's little scratch (Faber). 

Goldsmiths Prize 2021 chair of judges Dr Nell Stevens described Waidner as bringing “wit, swagger, playfulness and fury to an unfettered journey through an unjust justice system”.

Judge and author Kamila Shamsie said: “Isabel Waidner collides the real and the mythic, the beautiful and the grotesque, to mind-bending effect. Time-travel constrained by the limitations of Google Maps and trials out of Hieronymus Bosch never out-dazzle the human heart in this novel of friendship, art, injustice and all that can be imagined and unimagined.

“From the first page, matadors in Camden seem entirely plausible and we wait to see what might be coming around the next corner. Waidner has a live, distinctive intelligence that pushes form to make us see the world around us in new ways—and perhaps even for the first time.”

M John Harrison, who won the prize last year, described the book as “effortlessly referential, fluid and funny, endlessly inventive, furious and resistant".

Waidner is the author of three novels, editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and has published critical and creative writing in journals including AQNB, Cambridge Literary Review, the Happy Hypocrite, Tank Magazine and Tripwire. They have been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize twice, and won the Internationale Literaturpreis in German translation for Gaudy Bauble (Dostoyevsky Wannabe).

The author will discuss Sterling Karat Gold in an online event for the Cambridge Literary Festival, in association with the New Statesman, on 18th November.