Rachel Cusk’s Parade has won the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, the U.K. award given annually to “a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best.”
Cusk’s novel, published in the U.S. in June by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, follows a series of artists reckoning with their troubled relationships and childhoods. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.”
Cusk has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize four times, more than any other author. Her previous nominations were for Outline, Transit, and Kudos.
Abigail Shinn, the chair of judges for the award, said in a statement, “Examining the life of the artist and the composition of the self, Rachel Cusk’s Parade exposes the power and limitations of our alternate selves. Probing the limits of the novel form and pushing back against convention, this is a work that resets our understanding of what the long form makes possible.”
Cusk beat out five other novels for the prize: All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles, Tell by Jonathan Buckley, Choice by Neel Mukherjee, Spent Light by Lara Pawson, and Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith.
The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013. Past winners include Eimear McBride for A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Lucy Ellmann for Ducks, Newburyport, and Isabel Waidner for Sterling Karat Gold.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
