Sarah Hall and Charlie Porter among writers on ‘genre-defying’ Goldsmiths prize shortlist

Sarah Hall, Charlie Porter and Yrsa Daley-Ward are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths prize.

The £10,000 award recognises fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”.

The books on this year’s shortlist are “slippery, genre-defying, vibrant, witty and profound”, said the judging chair, Amy Sackville, a senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Hall was shortlisted for Helm, which is about Britain’s only named wind, a book described as an “interwoven braid of narratives, ranging from prehistoric times to the present day” by one of the judges, Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Porter made the list for Nova Scotia House, a novel about the impact of Aids. In a Guardian review, Neil Bartlett wrote that the book “invites the reader to join him in an exhilarating, risk-taking, life-affirming experiment”.

Daley-Ward was picked for The Catch, a story of two sisters whose dead mother mysteriously reappears. “The Catch is an extraordinary shape-shifting, genre-defying work of fiction”, said the judge and writer Simon Okotie. “Reading, by turns, as popular fiction, literary fiction and science fiction, it calls all such distinctions into question.”

Joining Sackville, Haddon and Okotie on this year’s judging panel is the author Megan Nolan.

Also on the shortlist is We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown, who won the BBC’s national short story prize this week. Her debut novel, about three young women growing up in Doncaster, “manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original”, Catherine Taylor wrote in a Guardian review.

Ben Pester appears on this year’s list for The Expansion Project, in which a father, Tom, searches for his missing daughter, who he believes is lost in the business park he works in. The book “is formally a collage, put together decades or centuries in the future by an unnamed ‘Archivist’ who is meant to be studying the business park’s ‘Expansion Project’ but keeps getting drawn into individual lives such as Tom’s”, Keshava Guha wrote in a Guardian review.

Completing the shortlist is We Live Here Now by CD Rose, which looks at the aftereffects of the disappearance of an art installation. The book comprises a “dizzying, encyclopaedic series of stories linked by texture, resonance and suggestion”, Okotie said.

The winner of the prize will be announced at a ceremony at Foyles bookshop, London, on 5 November.

Last year’s prize was won by Rachel Cusk for her novel Parade. Previous winners of the prize, which is run in association with the New Statesman and is in its 13th year, include Eimear McBride, Ali Smith, Isabel Waidner and Benjamin Myers.