Eimear McBride named on the Goldsmiths Prize 2015 judging panel

Award-winning author Eimear McBride has been announced as one of the four judges for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize, to reward boldly original fiction.

McBride's A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, a decade after being rejected by publishers for being too experimental.

Since winning the Goldsmiths Prize 2013, her book has gone onto win the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Joining McBride on the panel for this year’s £10,000 Prize are author Jon McGregor, the New Statesman’s lead fiction reviewer Leo Robson and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths Josh Cohen, who will chair the panel.

The annual Prize, which is open to novels written by authors from the UK or the Republic of Ireland, is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.

McBride commented:

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“After many years in the literary wilderness, receiving the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, with the kind of work it was established to support, felt rather like a surprise invitation home.”

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Ali Smith, the winner of the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize for her novel How To Be Both, described the Prize as “about the thing closest to your heart if you work with the novel as a form”.

The Prize was launched in 2013 and received widespread critical acclaim for celebrating fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form. In some quarters the Goldsmiths Prize was hailed as the natural successor to the Man Booker, after the latter expanded to allow American authors to enter.

Chair of Judges Josh Cohen commented: “The prize creates an ongoing conversation among and between staff and students. It reminds us that when we debate literary form, we’re involved not in some specialist academic concern, but in urgent questions about how to imagine the world today.”

Tom Gatti, Culture Editor of the New Statesman, added: "The New Statesman is proud to continue its close partnership with a prize that has successfully put audacity and invention back on the literary agenda."

The 2015 Prize will be officially launched at Goldsmiths on 28 January when last year's winner Smith will return to read from her winning novel as part of an event organised by The Goldsmiths Writers' Centre and the New Statesman.

Goldsmiths Prize - the literary prize created by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. 

For more details about the Goldsmiths Prize 2015, visit www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize or follow @GoldsmithsPrize on Twitter.

 

Key dates for the Goldsmiths Prize 2015:

23 January - Prize open for submissions

28 January - Goldsmiths Prize 2014 winner Ali Smith returns to Goldsmiths 

27 March - closing date for submission of entry forms

3 July - closing date for submission of finished books

1 October - shortlist announced

11 November - winner announced