Biographer and critic Dr Frances Wilson and novelist and poet Will Eaves will judge this year’s £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize, which awards “literature at its most novel”.
Wilson, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, will chair the panel, comprising Eaves alongside novelist Sarah Ladipo Manyika and critic and short-story writer Chris Power.
Both Eaves and Ladipo Manyika have been shortlisted for the prize in previous years: Eaves for The Absent Therapist in 2014 and Murmur (both CB Editions) in 2018 and Manyika in 2016 for her second novel Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic). Wilson’s biographies include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey. Power’s debut short-story collection Mothers was published by Faber & Faber in 2018; he is also a regular contributor of reviews to the NS.
Wilson said: “It is a privilege and a pleasure to be chairing the judges in the eighth year of the Goldsmiths Prize. I look forward to immersive reading, invigorating arguments, and a renewed understanding of what the novel at its finest can achieve.”
This year’s Goldsmiths prize opened to submissions on 24 January 2020 and closes on 27 March. The six-book shortlist will be announced on 30 September, with the winner announcement following on 11 November.
The prize was launched in association with the New Statesman in 2013 to celebrate fiction that “breaks the mould”. Lucy Ellmann won last year’s award with Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar), a 1000-page novel written almost entirely in one long sentence, which was also shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Other former winners include Eimear McBride, who was awarded the first Goldsmiths Prize for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Ali Smith, Kevin Barry and Nicola Barker.
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