Event overview
What is a novel? What does the future hold for this most elastic of forms? With Simon Okotie, Tim Parnell, Lara Pawson & Amy Sackville.
The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the College and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best. But what is a novel, and what makes it novel? What does the future hold for this most restless, adaptable and elastic of forms?
The event will be held in RHB137a and followed by a wine reception in RHB142.
Simon Okotie is the author of the book-length essay The Future of the Novel and the Absalon novels: ‘Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.’ (London Review of Books) He is a judge for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize.
Tim Parnell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. His publications include Constructing Christopher Marlowe (co-edited with J. A. Downie) and critical editions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. He has written widely on Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, aspects of eighteenth-century culture and the broader traditions of the novel, and is currently completing Laurence Sterne: A Literary Life. He is Literary Director of the Goldsmiths Prize which he conceived and set up in 2013.
Lara Pawson lives on the edge of London, close to the forest. She is the author of three books. Spent Light (CB editions, 2024) was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2024, and named as a Book of the Year in The Guardian, New Statesman and TLS. This is The Place to Be (CB editions, 2016), a fragmentary memoir, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017, the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2017 and the PEN Ackerley Prize 2017. In the Name of the People (IB Tauris, 2014), an investigation into a massacre in Angola, was longlisted for the Orwell Book Prize 2015, shortlisted for the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2014, and was runner-up in the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2014. Formerly a BBC World Service journalist, she has made numerous radio programmes and has written regularly for the national and international press on politics, literature and art.
Amy Sackville's most recent book, Painter to the King (Granta, 2018), is about the painter Diego Velázquez and his life and work in the court of Philip IV of Spain. Her previous novels are Orkney (Granta, 2013), for which she received a Somerset Maugham Award, and The Still Point (Portobello, 2010), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, and is a judge for this year's Goldsmiths Prize.
Register via this eventbrite link to attend.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Jun 2025 | 6:30pm - 7:30pm |
Accessibility
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