Myers wins £10k Goldsmiths Prize for 'bold and experimental' book Cuddy

Benjamin Myers has won the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize for his "bold and experimental" book Cuddy (Bloomsbury), a retelling of the story of the hermit St Cuthbert, the "unofficial patron saint of the North of England".

Cuddy was selected from a six-strong shortlist, which was described by the judges as "ambitious and inventive".

Tom Lee, chair of the judging panel, said: “Benjamin Myers’ Cuddy is a book of remarkable range, virtuosity and creative daring. A millennia-spanning epic told in a multitude of perfectly realised voices, this visionary story of St Cuthbert and the cathedral built in his honour echoes through the ages. The reader comes away with a renewed and breathless sense of what a novel of this ambition is capable of.”

Tom Gatti, executive editor at the New Statesman, added: “Congratulations to Benjamin Myers for his extraordinary novel Cuddy – a prime example of the sort of ambitious, vital fiction that Goldsmiths and the New Statesman founded the prize to celebrate.”

Myers will appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival, in conversation with Gatti and Goldsmiths Prize judge Maddie Mortimer, whose first novel Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador) was shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize and won the Desmond Elliott Prize.