Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi (And Other Stories)
Seven Steeples by Sara Baume (Tramp Press)
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer (Picador)
Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (Faber)
there are more things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet)
Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams (Fitzcarraldo)
The shortlist for the 10th Goldsmiths prize, described as “exhilarating” by the judges, features a novel written by a collaborative writing duo for the first time in the prize’s history.
Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams has made the shortlist for the £10,000 prize, which “celebrates fiction at its most novel” and was set up with the New Statesman in 2013.
Also on this year’s shortlist are Peaces, the seventh novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Seven Steeples by Sara Baume and the Orwell prize-shortlisted There Are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler.
Two debut novels have also made the list: Booker prize-longlisted Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, and Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi.
Chair of the judges, Tim Parnell, said all six novels are “strikingly distinctive, but they are united in their creative daring”.
“Unwilling to keep treading the beaten track, our authors have found new ways of telling to eye-opening and exhilarating effect,” the director of the prize and senior lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, added.
Diego Garcia is about two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, who meet the poet of the title, named for his mother’s island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973.
Described as a tragicomedy, the book interrogates the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government.
Novelist Ali Smith, a judge for this year’s prize, said the novel was an “extraordinary achievement” and a “paean to connectivity and a profound study of the tragedy of human disconnect”.
“At its heart is an experiment with form that asks what fiction is, what art is for, and how, against the odds, to make visible, questionable and communal the structures, personal and political, of contemporary society, philosophy, lived history,” she added.
Poet Arshi’s Somebody Loves You is about Ruby, who gives up speaking at a young age, and whose mother goes through bouts of illness. Judge Natasha Brown, whose novel Assembly was shortlisted for the prize in 2021, said it was “quietly exceptional”.
“Deftly woven chapters, subtle and assured in their piercing poetry, amount to an astonishingly broad and empathetic tapestry of modern Britain,” she said.
Judge Tom Gatti, executive editor of culture at the New Statesman, described Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies as a “remarkable and ambitious” novel. The book is told partly from inside the body of protagonist Lia, who receives a cancer diagnosis. “A love story ruled by biology, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies takes interiority to a new level,” said Gatti.
Peaces by Oyeyemi is about couple Otto and Xavier Shin, who embark on a mysterious and strange train journey, where they meet Ava Kapoor, the sole full-time inhabitant of the train. Smith said the book was a “blast of visionary life and energy”. “This novel unfixes everything and sends us out renewed,” she added.
Also focusing on a couple is Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples, which is the story of Bell and Sigh, who cut themselves off from friends and family. Spanning seven years, the novel takes place in a remote house in the south-west of Ireland. Brown said the book’s “bleak, beautiful prose resonates like a ghost story: haunting and unforgettable”.
Fowler’s second novel There Are More Things is about Catarina, born to a well-known political family in Brazil, and Melissa, a south London native. When the pair meet in 2016, as political turmoil unfolds across Brazil and the UK, their friendship takes flight. Parnell said it was both “a celebration of the pleasure of being alive and an impassioned condemnation of some of the horrors of contemporary history”.
The winner of the prize will be announced on 10 November. The 2021 prize was won by Isabel Waidner for Sterling Karat Gold, their third novel.
