Goldsmiths Prize 2025 shortlist revealed

The shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize 2025 - the £10,000 prize which rewards fiction that breaks the mould and extends the possibility of the novel – has been announced.

The Goldsmiths Prize 2025 shortlist, which includes four debut novels, covers themes from relationships, friendship, family ties and girlhood to our connections with nature, with our working lives, with art and even with reality.  

The six shortlisted novels are: 

• Colwill Brown, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Chatto & Windus)
• Yrsa Daley-Ward, The Catch (Merky Books)
• Sarah Hall, Helm (Faber)
• Ben Pester, The Expansion Project (Granta)
• Charlie Porter, Nova Scotia House (Particular Books)
• C. D. Rose, We Live Here Now (Melville House)

It was announced following the annual New Statesman / Goldsmiths Prize lecture, delivered by Geoff Dyer at the Southbank Centre. 

Now in its thirteenth year, the Goldsmiths Prize was launched in association with the New Statesman in 2013 with the goal of celebrating the creative daring associated with Goldsmiths and to reward fiction from the UK and Ireland that is genuinely novel and embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.   

Chair of Judges and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Amy Sackville, said: “These books in their very different ways take full advantage of the form's resources and possibilities, bringing to the page startling, refreshing, unsettling ways of thinking and feeling: about thinking, about forms of consciousness, about how we live in the world together and alone, and about what the structures and parameters of that world may be.”  

Tanjil Rashid, Culture Editor at The New Statesman, said: “This shortlist will, as ever, guide readers to the most daring and challenging works of fiction in our culture. These are the writers whose experiments and sense of play are keeping the novel alive and vibrant in a too often unwelcoming cultural climate.” 

Joining Amy Sackville on the judging panel are Mark Haddon, author of four novels, including ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' (2003) and ‘The Porpoise’ (2019) (shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2019); Megan Nolan, author of ‘Acts of Desperation’ (2021) and ‘Ordinary Human Failings’ (2023) and contributor to the New Statesman and Simon Okotie, known for the acclaimed Absalon trilogy of novels and author of ‘The Future of the Novel’ (2025).