Rachel Cusk has won the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize for her novel Parade. The £10,000 prize for a novel that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the form” was awarded on 6 November at a ceremony in London.
Parade is the fourth of Cusk’s books that has been nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize: all three instalments of her celebrated Outline trilogy – Outline, Transit and Kudos – were shortlisted between 2014 and 2018. It also marks Cusk’s first win of a major UK literary award since the 1990s. “This prize actually stands for something,” Cusk said as she accepted the Goldsmiths trophy in Foyles bookshop in central London. “I’ve got where I’ve got by not winning prizes and by not being given that flattery and recognition, and it’s produced the work that I’ve made. But it’s still quite nice to win one, at the end of all that.”
The novel, featuring a series of visual artists based on real figures but all referred to by the initial “G”, blends essay, fiction, biography and philosophy. The novelist and Goldsmiths Prize judge Sara Baume wrote: “Every sentence in Parade seems to grapple with an idea. People die, perspective shifts, scenery changes, and yet there remains a clear, sharp line of thought that holds the reader. In effortlessly beautiful prose Cusk challenges the conventions of the novel form as well as addressing the relationship between literature and visual art. Parade is a ferociously illuminating novel that embraces the exquisite cruelty of the world at this present moment.”
In a recent interview with the New Statesman, Cusk spoke of how works by Georg Baselitz and Louise Bourgeois helped her formulate “a more visual and spatial account of gender” while writing Parade. She added that she felt “women are writing more boldly and radically about female experience in this moment, and that their work is being recognised, by readers at least”.
As well as fiction and essays, Cusk is the author of the memoirs A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. The Outline trilogy, Chris Power wrote in the New Statesman in 2018, “inspired a new wave of autofiction – or has at least led to that voguish term being applied, with varying amounts of accuracy, to any novel based closely on its author’s life.
The Goldsmiths Prize was co-founded by Goldsmiths University and the New Statesman in 2013 to celebrate novels from the UK and Ireland that embody “the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best”. This year’s prize was judged by Baume, the novelist Xiaolu Guo, the critic Lola Seaton, and the Goldsmiths academic Abigail Shinn who chaired the panel. Also shortlisted for this year’s prize were All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles, Tell by Jonathan Buckley, Choice by Neel Mukherjee, Spent Light by Lara Pawson and Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith.
An annual New Statesman Goldsmiths Prize lecture – on “why the novel matters” – was launched in 2016. This year’s lecture was delivered by the novelist and memoirist Deborah Levy – a former judge of the prize – on 24 October, as part of the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival, and will be published in the Christmas issue of the New Statesman and at newstatesman.com.
[See also: Why Rachel Cusk won the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction]
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