The Goldsmiths Prize 2014

Ali Smith’s How to be Both is winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize. Chair of Judges, Francis Spufford from Goldsmiths, says: "We are proud to give this year's Goldsmiths Prize to a book which confirms that formal innovation is completely compatible with pleasure - that it can be, in fact, a renewal of the writer's compact with the reader to delight and to astonish."

Chair of Judges’ Speech

Read the full press release

About the shortlist

From 119 novels entered, six remarkable books. Now in its second year, and settling into the literary calendar as a home for all that is bold and inventive in fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize announces its 2014 shortlist. From Ali Smith’s heartfelt yoking of dissimilar halves of story, through Will Eaves’ impeccable tuning of voices from the ether, Rachel Cusk’s elegant creation of a protagonist entirely in silhouette, Howard Jacobson’s dangerously sardonic dystopia, Paul Kingsnorth’s virtuoso Old English apocalypse, to Zia Haider Rahman’s grand filtration of the contemporary world through mathematics, friendship and finance, these are works which embody the adventurous creativity the Goldsmiths Prize was set up to celebrate.

Francis Spufford, Chair of Judges commented: ‘The Goldsmiths Prize rewards innovation in the form of the novel, a process with as many possible directions as there are writers settling down to their keyboards. We expected to be surprised, and we were; we expected to compare wildly dissimilar successes, and we did. We expected to argue, and we weren’t disappointed. Yet we’re delighted to have ended up with a shortlist that captures so much of the versatility with which the novel, these days, is being stretched, knotted, rejigged, re-invented.’

Tom Gatti, Culture Editor of the New Statesman added: ‘From Joyce and Woolf to Burroughs and Lessing to Will Self and Ali Smith, the New Statesman has always been a home for innovative prose. So we are delighted to continue our partnership with the Goldsmiths Prize and reward those novelists bold enough to forge new paths for the form.’

The judges on the shortlist

Geoff Dyer on Outline

On a flight to Greece where she is going to be teaching a creative writing class, the narrator begins talking to her neighbour. More accurately, initiating a pattern that will be repeated throughout the encounters and “conversations” that make up this hypnotic, funny and unsettling novel, he talks at her. Gradually her own identity emerges in response to – is given shape by – what is said to her. As one of her students puts it, the story constitutes a series of events she finds herself involved in, but on which she seems to have “absolutely no influence at all.” The irony, of course, is that all of these tales – the author’s tale – hold our attention because of Cusk’s unerring command of pace and tone.

Tom Gatti on The Absent Therapist

Reading The Absent Therapist is a little like spending an evening turning the dial on an old-fashioned radio: voices emerge from the static, gain perfect clarity, and then disappear. Some tell anecdotes, banal or momentous; some talk technical business on the phone; some compose polite but freighted letters; some only have time for an elliptical scrap of speech before the dial spins on. From these fragments Will Eaves has composed a slim but remarkable novel, somewhere between a modernist poem and an “Overheard on the Underground” collage – attuned to different registers, often witty, frequently poetic, always with the bright ring of truth.

Francis Spufford on J

We seem, at the beginning of J, to be in some melancholy fable about the idiocy of rural life, with two touchingly tentative lovers providing the only oasis of reflection in a desert of poor impulse control. But this isn’t the brutish past, it’s a future struggling with the always-denied, never-banished memory of a terrible act. The nuanced shading of literary fiction blends into the muffling cotton wool of apology-speak, to produce a stingingly satirical dystopia. You can argue with the premise of Jacobson’s nightmare, but then he expects you to. Obsessional, unexpected, this is a kind of meta-flirtation with paranoia, both mischievously controlled and genuinely fearful.

Geoff Dyer on The Wake

The publisher’s blurb is actually implausibly accurate: The Wake is a post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past. In the aftermath of the catastrophic defeat of 1066 small bands of guerrillas resist the Norman invasion. The events are chronicled by Buccmaster, a brutally unreliable narrator, in an adapted or shadow version of old English. At first the prospect seems unreadably off-putting; within twenty pages you get the hang of it; by thirty the suddenly fluent reader is immersed entirely in the mental and geographical contours of the era. But it works the other way too: we are seeing – and feeling and hearing – the living roots of Englishness.

Kirsty Gunn on In the Light of What We Know

In the Light of What We Know is doing what the novel has always done best - taking us into a deeply private place wherein, by staying there for a long time to read about the lives of others, we come to speculate upon ourselves. In the case of this novel, though, it does this not by surrounding us with a story we may lose ourselves in but instead requires that we participate in the ordering and arranging of its various kinds of content. One doesn’t just read this book, one reads hard.

Kirsty Gunn on How to be both

Ali Smith’s latest renovation of the novel genre is a stunning example of literary inventiveness, idiosyncratic presentation of character and her charming, disarming way with plot. How to be Both slices a line through the content of her story and places what Virginia Woolf would have called a “corridor” between the two halves. In that space the reader turns and turns again, our experience of the novel released from a sense of its ending and thrown into a state of ever-reading, re-reading, reading “both”.

Events 2014

Judges