Xlibris Publishing shares some literary news regarding the 2016 Goldsmith Prize.
The 2016 Goldsmith Prize has been won by a single sentence, or rather a novel composed of a single sentence. The book in question is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, taking home the £10,000.00. For four years the Goldsmith Prize has sought out to reward innovative, new writing that seeks to ‘break the mould’ when it comes to books. And for three out of those four years, an Irish writer has won the prize, with Mike McKormack being the third.
Solar Bones takes place on All Souls Day, in the November of 2008. The story occurs within the mind of Marcus Conway, an engineer from County Mayo in western Ireland. Marcus has been returned from the dead for the purpose of contemplating a singularly strange county, where the people have been known to starve and mortify themselves in the service to some higher power or ideal. It is a place of shrines and grottoes, of prayer-houses and hermitages. All making up an in-between realm of penance and atonement.
The chair of the Goldsmith prize judges, Blake Morrison, recounts how Solar Bones uses lyrical prose to touch upon such topics as politics, family, art, marriage, and many other aspects of everyday life. But such is McCormack’s writing that pieces of everyday life take on extraordinary life and quality.
Solar Bones was originally published by Tramp Press, a small and independent print company. Mike McCormack has also written two short story collections.
Read the full, original Guardian article here.
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