The longlist for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize was announced today and what an interesting line-up of books it is:
Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang Clan (in 36 Pieces), Will Ashon (Granta)
For The Good Times, David Keenan (Faber)
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss (Granta)
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
Heads of the Colored People, Naffissa Thompson-Spires (Chatto)
Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot (Bloomsbury)
Lanny, Max Porter (Faber)
Lowborn, Kerry Hudson (Vintage)
Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine (Stinging Fly)
The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton)
The Vogue, Eoin McNamee (Faber)
This Brutal House, Niven Govinden (Dialogue)
The only one of the twelve I’ve read so far is Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which I think is brilliant. It is still a complete mystery to me (and, it would seem, to many others) why it didn’t make the Women’s Prize shortlist, and it is therefore all the more wonderful to find it showing up here.
Of the others, I own the David Keenan (Keenan’s debut, This Is Memorial Device, was a standout for me, and this new novel looks even more compelling) and the McNamee has been on my to-read list ever since I saw Anna Burns recommending it shortly after she won the Booker. Lanny, Lowborn, This Btutal House and Sweet Home are all similarly on my to-read list for 2019, and I am very curious about the Will Ashon.
I have found increasingly with the Gordon Burn Prize that the longlist tends to be made up of books that I have either read or earmarked for reading – this kind of radical collision between fiction and non-fiction, memoir and poetry is very much where my interests lie at the moment. The only book on this list that I have not come across at all so far is Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir Heart Berries, which looks incredible and has a blurb from Kate Tempest – what more recommendation do I need?
The shortlist is announced on July 17th, which gives me seven weeks to read it. It’s going to be tight, but I’m going to try. I will also try to blog every book, followed by a round-up post including my own predictions and/or preferences for the shortlist. This will actually be the first time I’ve attempted to read an entire prize longlist, and I’m looking forward to the challenge. At this moment I have no preconceived ideas about what might get shortlisted and that is the best possible basis I can think of to go in on.
“A place on the longlist is recognition of work that stands out in the scale of its endeavour, often challenging readers’ expectations or pushing perceived boundaries of genre, sensibility or even the role of literature itself.”