Missouri Williams, China Miéville and Polly Barton are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths prize.
The £10,000 award recognises fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”.
Judging chair Francis Spufford, novelist and professor of creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, said the judges had found “newness of many different kinds” in this year’s submissions, adding: “We enjoyed ourselves, and we enjoyed being challenged.”
Williams was shortlisted for her Booker-longlisted novel The Vivisectors, set in an unnamed university town where academics and a group of gardeners are locked in a power struggle. In a Guardian review, Ian Maleney wrote: “Williams writes with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity – she revels in the wretched and the craven.”
Miéville’s The Rouse, an epic 1,200-page paranormal novel 20 years in the making, was described in Stuart Kelly’s Guardian review as “affecting, intelligent and, in more than one place, very, very frightening”.
The shortlist features two debuts, including the first novel from translator and nonfiction author Barton. What Am I, a Deer? follows a young woman who moves to Frankfurt to work for a video game company and becomes fixated on a man she encounters on her commute. It was described in a Guardian review as “a piercing study of yearning, and of the modern condition of feeling perpetually on the verge of one’s own life”.
Also on the shortlist is Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, one of two Irish authors on the shortlist and the author of A Ghost in the Throat. The book explores the history of women incarcerated in a Cork asylum, and was described by Brian Dillon in his Guardian review as a work of “extraordinary formal and ethical force”.
Another Irish author, Keith Ridgway, is shortlisted for Dooneen, which paints a picture of social unrest in Dublin. It is an “appealingly labyrinthine novel” featuring “wonderfully absorbing and offbeat comedy”, according to Michael Donkor’s Guardian review.
Completing the shortlist is another debut, Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo’s Attention-Seeking Behaviour, which is narrated by a compulsive liar and combines fiction with memoir and essay. Judge David Sexton said the book brings “brio worthy of a Muriel Spark heroine to telling us what she thinks we should know about her promiscuous, deceitful life in London now”.
“The Goldsmiths prize exists to remind us that the novel, as the name suggests, is new,” Spufford said. “It may be 300 years old, but in adventurous hands, it still has limitless possibilities as a form.”
The judging panel also includes writer and translator Kate Briggs, novelist Hari Kunzru and journalist and former Evening Standard literary editor David Sexton.
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Tanjil Rashid, culture editor at the New Statesman said: “A spirit of experimentation and freedom has been central to the novel and its enduring appeal; all of these books have that.”
The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London on 4 November.
Last year’s prize was won by CD Rose for We Live Here Now. Previous winners of the prize, which was launched in 2013 in association with the New Statesman and is now in its 14th year, include Rachel Cusk, Eimear McBride, Ali Smith, Isabel Waidner and Benjamin Myers.
