Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams have jointly won the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize for Diego Garcia, in a first for a major English-language literary fiction award. Ali Smith, one of the judges, described the co-written novel as “both a paean to connectivity and a profound study of the tragedy of human disconnect”. The announcement of the winners of the £10,000 prize, which runs in association with the New Statesman and celebrates “fiction that breaks the mould”, was made at a ceremony at the Social in central London on Thursday evening (10 November).
Soobramanien, who is British-Mauritian, and Williams, who is Scottish, met while studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Diego Garcia, which took them ten years to complete and was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in May, follows two writer friends in Edinburgh who are grappling with the colonial injustice of Britain’s seizure of the Chagos Islands.
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