'Creative daring' celebrated on first Goldsmiths Prize shortlist

01.10.13 | Benedicte Page - The Bookseller

Jim Crace, shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, also appears on the inaugural shortlist for the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize.

But Crace's Harvest (Picador) is joined on the shortlist by an eclectic mix of writers and publishers: Lars Iyer's black comedy Exodus (Melville House); Eimear McBride's debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press); David Peace's novel about football manager Bill Shankly Red or Dead (Faber); Ali Smith's boundary-blurring lecture collection Artful (Penguin); and Philip Terry's tale of the Norman conquest from the point of view of the Bayeux Tapestry embroiderers, Tapestry (Reality Street).

The Goldsmiths Prize has been set up to celebrate "the qualities of creative daring" associated with Goldsmiths, University of London, and to recognise fiction "that opens up new possibilities for the novel form".
The entries were judged by novelists Nicola Barker and Gabriel Josipovici, former New Statesman culture editor Jonathan Derbyshire and Dr Tim Parnell, head of the department of English and comparative literature at Goldsmiths.

Parnell said: "In the prize's inaugural year, we are delighted to announce a shortlist that so clearly exemplifies the spirit of the award. All six books are strikingly original and all of them refuse the ready comforts of convention. Making full use of the resources and possibilities of the novel form, each writer has found the distinct idiom that their story demands."

The winner will be announced on 13th November.

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