It would seem that the shortlist for the Goldsmith Award has been announced. The prize is awarded to the most innovative, experimental novel written in 2014. This years nominees are:

Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber)
The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves (CB Editions)
J by Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)
In The Light Of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman (Picador)
How To Be Both by Ali Smith (Penguin)

I wasn’t aware of the award – which is now in its second year – until Nina Allan mentioned it on her blog. As she points out, a third of the novels nominated appeared on the Man Booker shortlist (J and How To Be Both) and a third book, The Wake, was on the Man Booker longlist. I am tempted to read the other four novels. I’ve always been intimidated by experimental work, or at least those novels that specifically experiment with language and dialect.  But I’ve pushed myself this year to read more novels outside my comfort zone, which is why I can now look at a book like The Wake, written in a modified form of old English, with curiosity and not nauseating fear.

Going back to Nina Allan’s blog post, she questions whether women who write innovative works are more likely to be castigated by the public and reviewers compared to a man writing a similar sort of novel. She says:

While male writers are encouraged to be innovative, outspoken, avant garde, are women writers still being told, either directly (through not having their books published) or indirectly (through an underhum of hostility in the press and in society at large) that they should stick to ‘women’s issues’ or shut the f**k up?

Is it harder to be a woman in the avant garde?

You only have to take a look at some of the comments made on Goodreads about Rachel Cusk’s novel, Outline to think that the answer might be “Yes.” This is why even in a world saturated with genre and literary awards a new prize like the Goldsmiths can still carve out a space of its own, exposing us to the men and women writing genuinely novel works.