Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, a single-sentence novel, has won the 2016 Goldsmiths prize.
The award was established in 2013 “to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” The prize includes a £10,000 ($12,468) purse.
The book, published by Tramp Press, takes place over the course of a day in which a middle aged engineer returns from the dead. “Set over a few hours in a single day, and told in the first-person voice of a middle-aged engineer, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones transcends these seeming limits magnificently,” stated Professor Blake Morrison, chair of judges for the prize. “Politics, family, art, marriage, health, civic duty and the environment are just a few of the themes it touches on, in a prose that’s lyrical yet firmly rooted.”
The judging panel also included: writers Erica Wagner, Bernadine Evaristo and Joanna Walsh.