Smith’s novel, which has won the £10,000 award for mould-breaking works, comes in two versions: one starting with a Renaissance fresco painter, one with a modern-day teenager in mourning
Ali Smith this evening won the literary award she described as “the thing closest to your heart if you work with the novel as a form” for her dual-narrative story How to Be Both, a book the judges of the Goldsmiths prize have said “pushes the novel into thrilling new shapes”.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, Smith’s novel missed out to Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North last month. Today, a novel described as “dazzling in [its] daring” in the Guardian was honoured with the Goldsmiths prize, a new literary award worth £10,000 that sets out to recognise published fiction that opens up new possibilities for the novel form. Smith is the second winner, after Eimear McBride’s celebrated debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing took the inaugural prize last year.
Smith’s novel, How to Be Both, comes in two different versions, enabling its readers to experience its two parts - one about a Renaissance Italian fresco painter, one about a contemporary teenager whose mother has recently died - in a different order. Cited for its innovation “both in form, which borrows from the techniques of fresco painting, and in its inventive publication”, it beat titles including Paul Kingsnorth’s crowdfunded The Wake, which uses an invented version of Old English for a tale of life after the Norman invasion, Howard Jacobson’s dystopian J, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline.
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Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, Smith’s novel missed out to Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North last month. Today, a novel described as “dazzling in [its] daring” in the Guardian was honoured with the Goldsmiths prize, a new literary award worth £10,000 that sets out to recognise published fiction that opens up new possibilities for the novel form. Smith is the second winner, after Eimear McBride’s celebrated debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing took the inaugural prize last year.
Smith’s novel, How to Be Both, comes in two different versions, enabling its readers to experience its two parts - one about a Renaissance Italian fresco painter, one about a contemporary teenager whose mother has recently died - in a different order. Cited for its innovation “both in form, which borrows from the techniques of fresco painting, and in its inventive publication”, it beat titles including Paul Kingsnorth’s crowdfunded The Wake, which uses an invented version of Old English for a tale of life after the Norman invasion, Howard Jacobson’s dystopian J, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline.
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