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Spufford takes £10k Encore Award for 'endlessly inventive' Light Perpetual
Francis Spufford has won the £10,000 RSL Encore Award for his “tender, endlessly inventive” novel Light Perpetual (Faber).
The annual award, run by the Royal Society of Literature, celebrates outstanding achievements in second novels.
Spufford’s book resurrects five children killed in a wartime bomb-blast and asks what kind of a future these working-class youths would have had.
The author of five works of non-fiction, Spufford’s 2016 debut novel Golden Hill (Faber) won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize.
He said: “I’m unusually old for a second-time novelist, having taken so long to get up my courage to write fiction – but that makes me all the more grateful, and all the more heartened, for the vote of confidence the Encore Award represents. It’s a beacon for writers of any age who are negotiating the tricky territory that follows a first book. It’s a call to persist, as you discover how rich and how plural the art is in which you’re taking your second step.”
This year’s judges—Sian Cain, Nikesh Shukla and Paul Muldoon—commented: “Light Perpetual is a bold and poignant novel, one that encourages the reader to fully comprehend that the lives of others, even people they have not and will never meet, are as vivid and filled with meaning as their own; a remarkable work of empathy. This is an assured second novel from Spufford, who has fast become one of Britain’s most exciting fiction writers after his debut Golden Hill. It is a great pleasure to award this novel the Encore, and to wonder at what he might write next.”
Speaking to The Bookseller about the novel in 2020, Spufford said: “What I hope it has is the fascination of following out strands in the lives where everything makes sense when you look backwards, but you are constantly surprised going forwards.”
Light Perpetual was chosen from a shortlist featuring The High House by Jessie Greengrass (Swift Press), Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall (Canongate), The Giant Dark by Sarvat Hasin (Little, Brown) and Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic (Bloomsbury).
