Rachel Cusk’s ‘illuminating’ Parade featured on indie-dominated Goldsmiths Prize shortlist

Rachel Cusk’s “ferociously illuminating” Parade (Faber & Faber) and Mark Bowles’ “hilariously foul-mouthed monologue”, All My Precious Madness (Galley Beggar), have been shortlisted for the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize 2024, with five of the six books published by independent publishers.

The award celebrates fiction that “breaks the mould and extends the possibilities of the novel form”. The shortlist features six novels that find “new ways to tell stories that matter”, including Jonathan Buckley’s “truthful and absorbing” Tell (Fitzcarraldo) and Neel Mukherjee’s “intellectually impressive” Choice (Atlantic). The final two books vying for the prize are Lara Pawson’s “evisceration of solemn reality”, Spent Light (CB Editions), and Han Smith’s “hallucinatory” Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking (John Murray). 

The judging panel was chaired by Dr Abigail Shinn, lecturer in early modern literature in the department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. “Wildly different and yet unified by a restless curiosity about form, the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize 2024 demonstrates how the novel never stays still, always searching for new ways to tell stories that matter,” Shinn said. “These novels ask uncomfortable questions while nonetheless finding exuberance and joy in a form that makes such questioning both possible and pleasurable: the novel at its most novel.”

Entry for the 2024 prize was open to novels published between 1st November 2023 and 31st October 2024. Eligible books had to be written in English by citizens of the UK or the Republic of Ireland, or by authors who have been resident in the UK or Republic of Ireland for three years and have their book published there.

Author Sara Baume is also on the judging panel, alongside memoirist and novelist Xialou Guo and Lola Seaton, associate editor at New Left Review and New Statesman contributing writer.

Seaton described All My Precious Madness as “an exhilaratingly intelligent, hilariously foul-mouthed monologue: partly a crankish rant, railing violently – and digressively – against the crushing idiocies of contemporary life”, while Guo said that “Tell is a relentlessly truthful and absorbing tale about the human condition and a searing account of the complexity of life in the modern world”. Meanwhile, speaking about Cusk’s book, Baume said: “Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment.” 

Guo said Choice is an “intellectually impressive” and “immensely moving” book, while Spent Light is described by Baume as “an evisceration of solemn reality, a novel that somehow manages to balance horror, humour and incredible tenderness”. Moreover, speaking about Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, Shinn said that “Smith’s novel is a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure”.

The Goldsmiths Prize was launched in association with the New Statesman in 2013. The winner of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize will be announced at a ceremony at Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London, on 6th November 2024.