tion s st The
Goldsmiths Prize 2015
Award ceremony in association with
Contents
About Goldsmiths, University of London
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About the shortlist
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Shortlist 6 The judges on the shortlist
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Kevin Barry, Beatlebone 12 Richard Beard, Acts of the Assassins 15 Tom McCarthy, Satin Island 16 Magnus Mills, The Field of the Cloth of Gold 18 Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers 20 Adam Thirlwell, Lurid & Cute 22 The Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre
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Previous Prize Winners
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Mark d’Inverno Trio
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The Prize
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Goldsmiths Press
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About Goldsmiths, University of London Goldsmiths, University of London has a distinct kind of energy: one that stimulates and stirs.
We’re a small campus community with a global reach, bringing learning to life through powerful conversations and personal connections. Proud to nurture the best and the brightest minds, we’re looking at the world through our own lens.
Emerging scholars, great thinkers, ambitious students, dedicated staff – we’re all motivated by the same philosophy: to be a dynamic force for change.
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About the shortlist The judges of the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize present a shortlist of six novels, embodying the Prize’s spirit of creative risk and provocation. Richard Beard’s biblical thriller dizzyingly confounds ancient and modern histories, while Magnus Mills bends the timeless truths of the fable to the perplexing shape of our times. Tom McCarthy’s seductively cold anthropologist maps
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the darkest regions of our consumer culture, while the comically tortured speech of Adam Thirlwell’s narrator attunes us to its moral exhaustion. Kevin Barry boldly imagines the solitude and suffering of one of the last century’s great artists and pop icons, while Max Porter’s concentrated narrative of a family’s grief places a crow-shaped explosive device
under the foundations of the novel. Taken together, the shortlisted books offer a fascinating tableau of contemporary fiction at the cutting edge.
Professor Josh Cohen, Chair of Judges commented: ‘Now in its third year, the Goldsmiths Prize continues to demonstrate how greatly exaggerated are those hoary old rumours of the novel’s impending death. Having enjoyed a long and robust discussion of the different ways today’s novelists are challenging, breaking and remaking the rules
of their own form, we’re delighted to present this shortlist of audacious and original books. If there’s a red thread running through these fascinatingly diverse novels, it’s a very contemporary concern with life at its furthest edges. We hope to see the shortlist provoke much curiosity and argument among many readers about the possibilities of fiction today.’
Tom Gatti, Culture Editor of the New Statesman, added: ‘The Goldsmiths Prize shortlist has become an essential annual reading list for anyone interested in ambitious fiction. The New Statesman is delighted to continue its partnership with a prize that, in its third year, is already setting the literary agenda.’
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Shortlist
Beatlebone Kevin Barry Canongate
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Acts of the Assassins Richard Beard Harvill Secker
Satin Island Tom McCarthy Cape
Grief is the Thing with Feathers Max Porter Faber & Faber
The Field of the Cloth of Gold Magnus Mills Bloomsbury
Lurid & Cute Adam Thirlwell Cape
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The judges on the shortlist Eimear McBride on Beatlebone
Jon McGregor on Acts of the Assassins
John Lennon wants to visit his island off the west coast of Ireland but events conspire against him and, upon this small idea, a universe is built. Stylistically adventurous and utterly inimitable, Beatlebone is a book about the strange and the wonderful, time and place. But at its beating heart is the personal struggle within the struggle for art and by skill, wit and the sheer force of his linguistic will, Barry creates a great work of one himself.
The epigraph to Acts of the Assassins refers, in a quote from the New Testament, to one day being ‘as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.’ Richard Beard thrillingly enacts this visionary telescoping of time as he leads us on a hunt for the body of Jesus; we are at once in an age of Roman empire and vlogs, smartphones
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and shepherds, martyrs who are crucified upside down even as the tourists visit the historical sites of their martyrdom. Structurally daring and unfashionably theological, this novel takes a circular saw to received ideas about belief, fate, will, and storytelling. It’s also very funny, when it’s not gruesome.
Leo Robson on Satin Island Tom McCarthy’s thrillingly inventive novel, his first since C, seems to achieve the impossible: it draws humour from bone-dry material, and achieves moments of great beauty without acknowledging the existence of humanism, or love, or the soul, or even consciousness, except as something handy for registering oil spills, traffic jams, and parachutes that fail. Unfolding over numbered paragraphs – from 1.1 to 14.2 – the novel concerns U., an
anthropologist working on a Great Project for the Company. U. doesn’t have much of a life – he goes from well-paid if not exactly task-driven work by day to meaningless sex by night – but McCarthy gets exactly what he needs from him. The result, eerie and utterly singleminded, suggests new possibilities for the corporate satire, the comic monologue, and the novel of ideas, while inventing a genre all its own.
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Jon McGregor on The Field of the Cloth of Gold
Eimear McBride on Grief is the Thing with Feathers
A man arrives at a great field and makes camp. Others have been before him; others will follow. There will be quietly-argued disputes over precedence and territory, some of which will be settled by the sharing of biscuits. Written with a wonderful spareness and a brutally deadpan humour, The Field of the Cloth of Gold is an allegory of settlement, conquest, and empire, and of the very English art of passiveaggression. Fashioning another of his unique visions from a familiar landscape, Magnus Mills appears to be no less than a prophet of our own history.
In a quiet flat in London two little boys are left motherless and their Ted Hughes scholar father, bereft. This is a beautifully rendered and deeply moving meditation on bereavement, love and life in its aftermath. Along with the chancer Crow playing guide, spur and nurse, Porter’s own delicate games with form ensure Grief is the Thing with Feathers succeeds in becoming that rarest of birds, the truly poetic novel.
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Josh Cohen on Lurid & Cute All the elements of a sleazy noir are in place: a panicked awakening beside a naked, apparently lifeless female body, a spree of armed robberies, a deracinated urban landscape of empty, moneyed debauchery. But instead of the easy gratifications of pacey action and sardonic quips, Lurid & Cute is taken over by the
anxious, self-justifying digressions of the brattish man-child, at once ludicrous and oddly profound, who narrates it. The result is a brilliantly sustained stylistic tour de force, a horrifyingly funny novel whose garish estrangements of our language and world give them back to us in sharp and terrible focus.
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Kevin Barry, Beatlebone He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks ... John is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip. John owns a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland. Maybe it is there that he can at last outrun the shadows of his past. The tale of a wild journey into the world and a wild journey within, Beatlebone is a mystery box of a novel. It’s a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife. It is most of all a sad and beautiful comedy from one of the most gifted stylists now at work.
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Kevin Barry is the author of the novels City of Bohane and Beatlebone and two short story collections, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He was awarded the Rooney Prize in 2007 and won The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize in 2012. For City of Bohane he was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Irish Book Award, and won the Author’s Club First Novel Prize, The European Prize for Literature and the IMPAC Prize.
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Richard Beard, Acts of the Assassins Gallio does counterinsurgency. But the theft of a body he’s supposed to be guarding ruins his career. Bizarre rumours of the walking dead are swirling, there is panic in the air, and it’s his job to straighten out the conspiracy. He blows the case. Years later, the file is reopened when a second body appears. Gallio is called back by headquarters and ordered to track down everyone involved
the first time round. The only problem is they keep dying, in ever more grotesque and violent ways. How can Gallio stay ahead of the game when the game keeps changing? Acts of the Assassins is about one man’s struggle to confront forces beyond his understanding. And about how lonely a turbulent world can be.
Richard Beard is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: X20, Damascus, The Cartoonist, Dry Bones, and Lazarus is Dead, and three works of non-fiction: Muddied Oafs, How To Beat the Australians and Becoming Drusilla. He is Director of the National Academy of Writing in London.
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Tom McCarthy, Satin Island Meet U. – a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their ‘corporate anthropologist’ to help decode and manipulate the world around them – all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing.
him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together – a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.
Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards
As U. oscillates between the visionary and the vague, brilliance and bullshit, Satin Island emerges, an impassioned and exquisite novel for our disjointed times.
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Tom McCarthy is the author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature and three internationally celebrated novels: Remainder, Men in Space and, most recently, C, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural WindhamCampbell Literature Prize by Yale University. His creation, in 1999, of the International Necronautical Society has led to installations and exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, from Tate Britain and the ICA in London to The Drawing Center in New York.
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Magnus Mills, The Field of the Cloth of Gold ‘He has no literary precedent, and he also appears to have no imitators. He mines a seam that no one else touches on, every sentence in every book having a Magnus Mills ring to it that no other writer could produce’ Independent ‘Comedy’s blackest, funniest and most astute practitioner’ Daily Telegraph ‘Mills is a true original who has always ploughed his own – occasionally surreal – furrow in a series of comic gems’ Mail on Sunday It used to be just Hen. He had a tent in
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the west and he was the first. But more and more people are setting up camp in the lush pastures of the Great Field and with each new arrival life becomes a little more complicated. When a large and disciplined group arrive from across the river emotions run so high that even a surplus of milk pudding can’t smooth ruffled feathers. Change is coming; change that threatens to destroy the field’s promise of halcyon days…. In this witty and surreal fable Magnus Mills cements his status as one of Britain’s most original novelists.
Magnus Mills is the author of A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In and six other novels, including The Restraint of Beasts, which won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread (now the Costa) First Novel Award in 1999. His most recent novel, A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In, was published to great critical acclaim. His books have been translated into 20 languages. He lives in London.
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Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers Once upon a time there was a crow, a fairly famous Crow, who wanted nothing more than to care for a pair of motherless children.... In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This selfdescribed sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need
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him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal. In this extraordinary debut novella, Max Porter’s compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent. ‘Anyone who has ever loved someone, or lost someone, or both, will be gripped by it. It’s very sad and very funny. Crow is the blackest, blankest bad-guy I’ve met for years: Christopher Walken cross-bred with
The Joker (in feathers). I think it will go on to be a big success: widely read, and slightly feared.’ Robert MacFarlane ‘I’m not sure I’ve read anything like it before. It stunned me, full of beauty, hilarity, and thick black darkness. It will stay with me for a very long time.’ Evie Wyld
Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta Books and Portobello Books. He previously managed an independent bookshop and won the Young Bookseller of the Year award. He lives in South London with his wife and children. Grief is the Thing with Feathers is his first book.
‘I found it utterly astonishing. Truly, truly remarkable. At once deeply affecting and fiercely intelligent, an elegy and a celebration … [T]o my mind what elevates Porter’s work is the interplay of caustic wit and genuine pathos, and the raw humanity of the piece.’ Nathan Filer
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Adam Thirlwell, Lurid & Cute This yarn takes place in the suburbs of a giant city. In Brasilia they’re coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they’re having their first whisky sours – that’s what’s happening elsewhere in the world when our hero wakes up. Together with his wife and dog, he lives at home with his parents. He has had the good education and, until recently, the good job. In other words, the juggernaut of meaning was not parked heavily on our hero’s lawn. But then the lurid overtakes him – and whether this lurid tone is caused by our hero’s new unemployment, or his feelings for a girl who is not his wife, or the return of his old friend Hiro, it’s hard to say. What’s 22
definite is that a chain of events begins that feels to those inside it, narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent – complete with lies, deceit, and chicanery; one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes. While if you start to notice minute doubles and repeats, or wonder if what you took as some trick of perspective might in fact be a kink of reality, perhaps that shouldn’t be so much of a surprise... For very possibly this suburban noir as the story of a woebegone and global generation – and our hero, the sweetest narrator in world literature, may well also be the most fearsome.
Adam Thirlwell is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape; a novella, Kapow!; and a project including an essay-book – which won a Somerset Maugham Award – and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney’s. His work is translated into 30 languages. He has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
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The Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre The Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre, under the directorship of Professor Blake Morrison, has been established to encourage new writing, to stimulate debate about all forms of literature and to create links between the different parts of the university where creative writing takes place – the Departments of Art, English & Comparative Literature, Media & Communications and Theatre & Performance. Since its inauguration
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in 2013, the Centre has hosted a number of readings and discussions focused on contemporary fiction, with James Kelman, Geoff Dyer, Ali Smith, Gabriel Jospovici, Deborah Levy, Kirsty Gunn and the winner of the first Goldsmiths Prize Eimear McBride among those taking part. These readings complement those in the Richard Hoggart lecture series, which have previously featured Derek Walcott, Martin Amis, Hermione Lee, Julian Barnes,
Will Self, Rose Tremain, Wendy Cope, Tony Harrison, Les Murray and Terry Eagleton among others.
Previous Prize Winners Ali Smith’s How to be Both was awarded the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize. Chair of Judges, Francis Spufford from Goldsmiths, said: “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.”
Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize. Literary Director Tim Parnell said of the work: “Boldly original and utterly compelling...
just the kind of book the Goldsmiths Prize was created to celebrate, and we are delighted to have found such a remarkable novel in the award’s inaugural year.”
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Mark d’Inverno Trio “plays the idiom with relish, honesty and grace” John Fordham, The Guardian
Mark d’Inverno takes his inspiration from Keith Jarrett, John Taylor, Bill Evans and Michel Petrucciani.
“d’Inverno is a fine pianist with a subtle touch and a lovely flow of ideas... performed with wit and panache” Ian Carr, Pick of the Month, BBC Music Magazine “a player of considerable quality, with technique and taste to spare... sometimes understated, often urgent, always rewarding.” Jazzwise Magazine
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Larry Bartley plays with incredible lucidity and freedom and is regarded by many as one of the UK’s greatest jazz bassists having worked for many years with leading musicians such as Courtney Pine, Jean Toussaint, Denys Baptiste and Jason Yarde. Winston Clifford has worked with many of the leading jazz musicians in the world including Courtney Pine, Bheki Mseleku, Jason Rebello, Gary Husband, Ronnie Scott’s Band, Julian Joseph, Andy Sheppard, Jean Toussaint Band, Bobby Watson, Monty Alexander, Gary Bartz, Art Farmer, Archie Shepp and Freddie Hubbard.
The Prize Designed by Tom Wagstaff and Matt Williams, Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Goldsmiths Press Goldsmiths Press is a new university press seeking to take advantage of digital technology to revive and regenerate the traditions and values of university press publishing. Goldsmiths Press is driven by the need for new modes of publishing in the digital age. It will build on the
principles of digital-first publishing, and will publish across formats, from print books to eBooks, apps to online resources. Goldsmiths Press will launch its first title in early 2016. www.gold.ac.uk/ goldsmiths-press/ 27
Fict at its mos www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize @GoldsmithsPrize