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Megan Nolan and John Niven on 'blazing' bumper shortlist for £10k Gordon Burn Prize
Megan Nolan and John Niven are among those on the bumper shortlist for this year’s Gordon Burn Prize, with a doubled up prize fund of £10,000.
Founded in 2012 by New Writing North, Faber & Faber and the Gordon Burn Trust, the award honours the writer Gordon Burn, who died in 2009, and seeks to celebrate those who follow in his footsteps. It celebrates both fiction and non-fiction books “that are fearless in their ambition and execution”.
With new sponsorship from Newcastle University and NCLA, the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, the prize fund for 2023–24 has doubled to £10,000.
There are seven books on this year’s shortlist, up from last year’s five, with two from HarperCollins imprints: novel If I Survive You by prize-winning American writer Jonathan Escoffery (Fourth Estate), “a chronicler of life at its most gruesome and hopeful”, along with Killing Thatcher by Guardian journalist Rory Carroll (Mudlark) which organisers pitched as “a gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close" to killing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984.
The two Penguin Random House-tipped titles include Betty Trask-winning Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings (Jonathan Cape) which centres around a reclusive Irish family on an English council estate in 1990 as a mystery unfolds around them about the death of a young girl.
There is also Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Australian author Anna Funder, offering “a blazing feminist text uncovering the life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a woman forgotten by history, and the hidden creative genius of women everywhere”.
Among the indie contenders, longtime novelist Niven is shortlisted his first non-fiction book, O Brother (Canongate Books), which organisers said “evokes a working-class childhood of the 1970s and ’80s and tries to answer the questions of guilt, culpability and regret that often haunt the survivors of suicide”.
Additionally nominated novel Kick the Latch (Daunt Originals) by Los Angeles-based Kathryn Scanlan which “vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack” and “investigates form and authenticity” inspired by transcribed interviews with a horse trainer.
Canada-born artist and author Tanya Tagaq has been recognised for Split Tooth (And Other Stories) which follows an Inuk girl who grows up in the Artic in the 1970s, which “explores a gritty small town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth", according to organisers.
This year’s shortlist was judged by writers Terri White, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, Andrew Hankinson and Sheena Patel. White, who chaired the judging panel, said: “Seven books on the shortlist? Yes, we were greedy this year. But after hours of discussion and debate, it was clear we’d need to take through all seven blazing, eclectic books to fully represent the prize, and the legacy of Gordon’s writing, today.
“Collectively, they interrogate history, perspective, form, genre and the line between fact and fiction. They take risks. And they do so with fresh voice and fascinations rooted in today”
Hankinson said: “We’ve ended up with a shortlist of books which, as a writer, make you want to raise your game.”
Patel added: “These books reflect Gordon Burn’s ethos of form-pushing, well-told stories with strong writing at their core.”
The winner will be announced on 7th March at an event at Northern Stage in Gordon Burn’s home city of Newcastle upon Tyne, featuring readings from the shortlist and hosted by the BBC’s Nick Ahad.
The winning writer will receive £10,000 and the chance to undertake a writing retreat at Burn’s cottage in Berwickshire.
Preti Taneja won last year’s award for her “staggering” book Aftermath (And Other Stories).
