New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Giramondo are pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2024 Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers $10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in North America by New York-based New Directions, in the UK and Ireland by the London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo.
The prize rewards novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style.
The shortlist, selected from over 1,100 submissions worldwide, is as follows:
The 2024 Novel Prize Shortlist
How to Live Together by Rey Conquer
The unnamed narrator of How to Live Together moves into a house to cat-sit, seeking solitude away from the pressures of having to relate to others—only to discover that the cats present their own challenges of relation. Through a kaleidoscopic prose form, How to Live Together explores the relationship between queerness, nature and a masculine fantasy of self-sufficiency, questioning the human projections and desires bound up in the genre of nature writing, and exploring what an authentic relationship between humans and non-humans—as well as between humans—might be.
Rey Conquer is a lecturer in German literature and film at Queen Mary, University of London, and a freelance writer; they are also currently translator-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North. Their academic monograph, Reading Colour (2019), won the 2018 Institute for German Studies Early Career Researcher Prize. They write reviews and essays on a wide range of topics – from contemporary German culture to queer morality – for the TLS, LA Review of Books, Burlington Contemporary and others, and their art criticism was shortlisted for the Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize. A short story, "It’s Called Fashion", was published in the award-winning anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers,
Porcupine by Nick Holdstock
Porcupine recreates the first meeting of the art historian Aby Warburg and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer in a Swiss asylum in 1924. A brilliant Renaissance scholar, Warburg became increasingly afraid of political and social collapse and the rise of anti-Semitism during the aftermath of the First World War, fears which led to a psychotic breakdown. Warburg is in a highly paranoid state when Cassirer visits, and as the two men walk loops of the institution gardens, he conducts a series of circular, elliptical monologues, an escalating struggle between his psychosis and his attempts to lucidly convey his core ideas and convince Cassirer of his sanity. Porcupine engages philosophical and intellectual debates inspired by the scholarship of both men, with Warburg’s need for connection at its emotional heart.
Nick Holdstock’s most recent novel Quarantine was published by Swift Press in 2023. His previous books are The Tree That Bleeds (Luath, 2011), The Casualties (St Martins Press, 2015), China’s Forgotten People (Bloomsbury, 2015, 2019), Chasing the Chinese Dream (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The False River (Unthank, 2019). He writes for the TLS, the FT, the Guardian, the LRB and the Literary Review, among other publications.
Moss House by Hollen Singleton
Within days of a mysterious airborne event in the Tasman, mosses grow over streets and houses, starting in Sydney and spreading along the coast. Green auroras appear in the sky at night, disturbing electricity and the internet, raising speculation about their effect on the human population residing under the new lights. The story moves through multiple perspectives, centering on Matt, a visitor, and the housemates he joins: Gia, Jayden and Neve. Matt is from the west coast of Aotearoa, accompanied by his ghost; Neve is from Lord Howe Island and aims to return; Gia and Jayden focus on the share house—on rent, jobs and meals—and on protecting it against the rapidly changing outside world. Mosses expand, transforming the landscape and people. Over a span of ten days, housemates disappear. Some change, some flee, and some remain in waiting.
Hollen Singleton is a writer, former editor of Going Down Swinging and teacher at the University of Melbourne. They live in Sunshine, Naarm.
Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro
Ruins, Child—a hybrid novel written in triptych form—renders the lives of six cohabiting women, and the community/landscape in which they exist. A surreal musing, this work uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.
Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. She is a writer, photographer, and translator who holds an MFA in Fiction from The New School. Giada’s writings have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB and the Chicago Review of Books, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency fellow. Her debut collection, Some of Them Will Carry Me, was named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022.
Touch Me Now by Neal Amandus Gellaco
Touch Me Now weaves a kaleidoscopic tapestry of contemporary Filipino life across a fortnight, against a backdrop of escalating political and military tension. Opening on the third Sunday of October, as the Dela Rosa family hold a feast in celebration of Our Lady de Navire, the narrative delves into each character in turn, culminating in the president’s declaration of martial law and a rally in Mendiola. Part Two resumes on the last Saturday of October, at a party held despite the strict governmental curfews and public searches. The intertwining lives of the characters continue, as the tightening clutches of tyranny force small businesses to close, with the price of food ever-increasing and daily life now lived under the waiting, watching presence of guns.
Neal Amandus Gellaco is a Teaching Associate at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he is pursuing his MA in English Studies: Anglo-American Literature. His short stories can be found in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature and Otherwise Engaged: A Literary and Arts Journal.
The winner of the 2024 Novel Prize will be announced in February 2025 and published in early 2026.
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, the inaugural winner in 2020, was selected from close to 1,500 submissions worldwide, and was published in March 2022. Cold Enough for Snow has since been sold into over twenty territories, and was the recipient of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 2023. The shortlisted entries in 2020 were Glenn Diaz’s Yñiga, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Christine Lai’s Landscapes, Nora Lange’s Us Fools, and Lani Yamamoto’s Ours and Others’.
Selected from the submissions of close to 1,000 writers, Anne de Marcken and Jonathan Buckley shared the 2022 Novel Prize for their novels It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over and Tell, both published in March 2024. The shortlisted titles for the 2022 Novel Prize were Darcie Dennigan’s Forever Valley, Marie Doezema’s Aurora Australis, Florina Enache’s Palimpsest, Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, Valer Popa’s Moon Over Bucharest and Sola Saar’s Anonymity Is Life.
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