Ali Smith wins the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize for her novel “How To Be Both”

The £10,000 prize for experimental fiction has been awarded to the Scottish writer for her sixth novel which is “dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance”.

By Philip Maughan

(Photo By Ali Smith: "The novel is a revolutionary force". Image: Rex)

Ali Smith has been awarded the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize for her sixth novel How To Be Both. The Scottish-born writer’s previous works include four collections of short stories, seven novels – that is if you include the genre-defying essay collection Artful, as last year’s Goldsmiths judges chose to do in drawing up their inaugural shortlist – a memoir, Shire, and two plays. Smith collected the £10,000 award at a ceremony this evening (12 November) at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London.

After being shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize (for Hotel World in 2001, The Accidental in 2005, and How To Be Both in 2014), twice for the Orange (now Baileys) Prize (Hotel World and The Accidental), it has taken a literary contest dedicated to “opening up new possibilities for the novel” to fully recognise Smith’s long-standing commitment to language and form. Like Eimear McBride, the debut novelist who won in 2013 with A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Smith seeks to find a path out of modernism which resists being dry or remote. Perhaps most remarkable (and in contrast to Girl) is that even in dealing with grief, as she frequently does, Smith has found a way to make that path feel optimistic.

How To Be Both is a kind of diptych: published in two editions with its two halves rearranged, exploring themes of gender, art, bereavement and politics to create a reading experience which resembles a fresco – layered, composite, visible from a number of angles. One half of the book concerns a clever and pedantic 16-year-old, George, and the differences between her and her passionate, free-thinking mother who has recently died. The other imagines the life of a little-known Renaissance painter, Francesco del Cossa, about whom nothing more is known than that “he” asked for a pay rise. Like the “Time Passes” section in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, or more recently, Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the two halves are linked in a non-linear conversation informed by the reader’s interpretation of events.

In her review of the book, the critic Frances Wilson wrote: “How To Be Both is a novel of ideas in which the ideas break free and float like figures in the fresco. It’s dizzyingly good and so clever that it makes you want to dance.” The Chair of Judges, Francis Spufford, who was joined this year by Geoff Dyer, Kirsty Gunn and NS Culture Editor Tom Gatti, said of the panel’s decision: “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.”

The Prize, run in association with the New Statesman, is now in its second year and will continue to assert its place among the expanding number of prizes attempting to fit the increasingly diverse publishing landscape. Following her victory in 2013, McBride’s novel went on to win the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (plus a number of others) and publication rights were sold to Faber & Faber. “The support that winning the Goldsmiths Prize gave A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing changed the entire life of the book and my own with it,” she said earlier today. “It afforded me the, previously impossible, opportunity to connect with an interested, engaged readership and I am incredibly proud to have been its first recipient.”

After a reading by the shortlisted authors Goldsmiths University last month, an audience member asked each writer to describe their novels stood for. Some declined to answer, but Smith didn’t hesitate: “Justice and injustice, on a larger scale than we’re used to thinking about. Borderless justice.” When asked about originality in her work, she explained that while it may be the case there is nothing new under the sun, “The novel is a revolutionary force. It can do all sorts of things and reveals to us the cycles in history and changes in the things that happen to us as human beings … there is something live about the novel that makes it brand new every time you find a shape for it. Even if Tristram Shandy did it first.”

Click here to read Frances Wilson’s review of How To Be Both

Click here to read Tom Gatti’s account of the judging

Eimear McBride and Ali Smith both appear at Cambridge Literary Festival, in association with the New Statesman, on 30 November