Writer and critic Blake Morrison to chair Goldsmiths Prize 2016

Writer and critic Blake Morrison and #ReadWomen campaign founder, Joanna Walsh, are among the judges for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize - the £10,000 award created by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman, to reward boldly original fiction.

Alongside Morrison and Walsh are award-winning author and Brunel University creative writing professor, Bernardine Evaristo, and author and critic, Erica Wagner, former literary editor of The Times and contributing writer for The New Statesman.

Submission of entry forms to the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize will open on Friday 22 January and close on Friday 25 March.

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

Since its launch, the Goldsmiths Prize - won last year by Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone - has received widespread critical acclaim for celebrating fiction that opens up new possibilities for the novel form.

From a shortlist of six books, the winner will be announced on Wednesday 9 November.

Eimear McBride's A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing was awarded the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, a decade after being rejected by publishers for being too experimental. It went on to win several other major awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

McBride was followed by Ali Smith’s widely-acclaimed How to Be Both in 2014, with Smith later giving credit to the Goldsmiths Prize for encouraging greater risk-taking in the publishing world.

Kevin Barry took the Prize in 2015 for his intricately woven imagining of John Lennon’s visit to an island of the coast of Ireland to undertake primal scream therapy.

Chair of judges Blake Morrison is notable for his work in variety of genres. His memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father? won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He is a former literary editor of both The Observer (1981–89) and the Independent on Sunday (1989–95). Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Professor Morrison comments: “In three short years, the Goldsmiths Prize has already established itself as one of the most important literary awards in the UK, and I'm honoured to be chair of the judges this time.”

Tom Gatti, culture editor of the New Statesman, added: "The New Statesman is delighted to continue its partnership with a prize that reminds us how ambitious, inventive and vital British fiction can be.”

Visit the Goldsmiths Prize website for more information.