Solar Bones

The winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize

Solar Bones author Mike McCormack said winning the Goldsmiths Prize 2016 was “payback” for his publishers Tramp Press and agent who had backed him during his “long and difficult adventure” as a writer.

Speaking after collecting his £10,000 cheque at an event held at Foyles Charing Cross Road, McCormack said: “It’s about time the prize-giving community honoured experimental works and time that mainstream publishers started honouring their readership by saying: ‘Here are experimental books’.

“Readers are smart. They’re up for it. That was what the people at Tramp Press taught me – they’re up for it. There are readers out there and they have been proved right.”

Bernardine Evaristo on Solar Bones

The life of a middle-aged engineer in the west of Ireland might not sound like a remarkable fictional proposition, but this novel explores the personal, domestic, political, philosophical and global in a free-flowing prose style that elevates it into something quite beautiful and transcendent. Its impressive emotional and intellectual energies fuel a wholly enjoyable reading experience.

Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again. Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.

About the author

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Solar Bones is his third novel. He lives in Galway.

Back to the Shortlist