Shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize

I love Fitzcarraldo‘s books so it is fabulous news to discover that my novel has been shortlisted for the prestigious Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize. It is a list of only five books so it’s a huge honour to be shortlisted, particularly since it is for the entire manuscript rather than an excerpt. I thank the judges. Reading over three hundred novels must have been a challenge!

Fitzcarraldo is a fabulous publisher renowned for innovative writing, and for publishing books that are different, original, not part of the mainstream. You can rely on their books for exercising your imagination, challenging your expectations, taking you on a journey that will expand your understanding and inevitably surprise you and possibly tangle up your thoughts. You can guarantee it’ll be good if it’s Fitzcarraldo, you barely need to read the blurbs. Believe me!

They publish Olga Tokarczuk‘s 2018 Nobel Prize-winning novel ‘Flights’, translated by Jennifer Croft, which is on my to-be-read pile. The gorgeous bright blue covers of the books in their fiction list and the classy white covers of their non-fiction are beautiful, and it’s lovely to handle a matt book that doesn’t shout about itself. I love the sense of discovery that a plain cover offers. Rather secretive.

Coincidentally, I am currently reading a Fitzcarraldo book Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. Fitzcarraldo manage to pick extraordinary books! It’s a big book and will take me a while, and is about the collapse of the USSR. A subject I find fascinating. It is described as a ‘collage of voices’. Alexeivich writes in a form of ‘documentary literature’ in which she tells of real events, in the voices of real people. How much is fictionalised, I don’t know. It’s an interesting genre though.

Here are a few of the Fitzcarraldo books that I have read and enjoyed. The one on the top, my dog enjoyed too. Naughty Esmé! I possess a handful of others but they’re scattered around the house, and I don’t want to disturb the dust, not right now anyway.

My novel didn’t win and what comes next for ‘Breath’ remains up in the air but my agent is busy sending it out to publishers. Anyway, I am busy editing the second draft of the next novel. I now have six unpublished novels and an unpublished short story collection. A great many words that few people have read!

This is how Fitzcarraldo describe the prize:

…the prize looks for novels which explore and expand the possibilities of the form, which are innovative and imaginative in style, which tackle subjects and themes relevant to the world we live in. The winner receives a £3,000 prize in the form of an advance against publication with Fitzcarraldo Editions, and will be published in Fitzcarraldo Editions’ fiction list, alongside writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Mathias Enard, Camilla Grudova, John Keene, Esther Kinsky, Olga Tokarczuk and Alejandro Zambra. 

How my novel meets the criteria, I am not sure but, for the record, here’s the annnoucment of the winner:

Many thanks, again, to Jacques Testard at Fitzcarraldo Editions. Here is an interesting article about their approach to publsihing and picking those Nobel Prize-winning books.