Why Isabel Waidner won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize

In Sterling Karat Gold the author writes with incandescent rage and surreal humour.

Photo by Suzie Howell for the New Statesman

It’s extremely rare to read a first paragraph of a novel that makes you punch the air and say “yes!”. This is what happened when I opened Isabel Waidner’s third novel, Sterling Karat Gold, winner of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize for fiction.

“I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservatism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this Sterling heart.”