Now in its thirteenth year, the Goldsmiths Prize was launched in association with the New Statesman in 2013 with the goal of celebrating the creative daring associated with Goldsmiths, University of London, and to reward fiction from the UK and Ireland that is genuinely novel and embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.
2025's winner was announced at Foyles on 5th November 2025.
The Winner: 2025
The Winner: 2025
We Live Here Now“A book about what art is and what it does (or doesn’t do), C.D. Rose’s We Live Here Now in its turn asks profound questions of the contemporary world and the systems that power it, in the aether, deep under the surface, far out at sea. Motifs emerge and recur: containers, erasures, shady markets, sound and silence, ‘echo and drone’. This constellatory novel tests the bounds of the form while delivering all of its satisfactions: at once hilarious and deeply haunting, intellectually challenging and supremely entertaining.”
- Amy Sackville, Chair of Judges and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London
The Shortlist
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The Judges:
Chair of judges and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths Amy Sackville and fellow judges Mark Haddon, Megan Nolan and Simon Okotie share their experiences of being on the panel and the—often painful—process of finding a winner.
Amy Sackville
Amy Sackville
“I have been so invigorated by our discussions. This prize asks us to consider the possibilities of my favourite literary form, the novel; my fellow judges are as excited by and passionate about that conversation as I am. I'm so pleased to be part of it and to get these brilliant books in front of readers.”
Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and won the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and her second was Orkney, which won a 2014 Somerset Maugham Award. Her most recent novel, Painter to the King was published in 2018.
Photo Credit: Sarah Clark Photography
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon
“The enjoyment to be had from judging any literary prize depends on the quality of the books submitted and quality of your fellow judges. I won on both counts. We had a stack of excellent novels to read and our discussions about their relative merits were fascinating and entirely good humoured, which is not always guaranteed. The added bonus is that this is the Goldsmiths Prize, so we’re continuing a great tradition and helping to cheerlead for boundary-pushing fiction, which is precisely the kind of fiction I want to read.”
Mark Haddon is a writer and artist. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) won seventeen literary prizes, was translated into forty-five languages, and went on to become an award-winning stage adaptation by Simon Stephens. His most recent works of fiction include a novel, The Porpoise (2019), and a collection of fables and stories, Dogs and Monsters (2024).
Megan Nolan
Megan Nolan
“Friends of mine who had judged prizes in the past warned me that I may find it a slog, between the quantity of books and the always potentially difficult proposition of interacting with other writers, but happily I have been able to tell them how wrong they were. I loved my time judging the Goldsmiths Prize, and rather than feeling burdened by the reading I was delighted to find just how many of the submissions were revelatory and deeply pleasurable. The only pain of the experience has been that of having to omit books I loved from the final shortlist.”
Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, White Review, Guardian and Frieze amongst others. For her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, Nolan was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Ordinary Human Failings was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize and the RSL Encore Award.
Simon Okotie
Simon Okotie
“One of the many things I enjoyed about our shortlist meeting was the sense of genuinely not knowing which book would win this year's prize. It will make for a fascinating discussion when we next meet!”
Simon Okotie is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, In the Absence of Absalon and After Absalon, an acclaimed trilogy of novels published by Salt. In the Absence of Absalon was longlisted for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize. His work has appeared in FT Weekend and Gorse, and at 3:AM Magazine and The White Review. Two Degrees of Freedom, a short story, is published by Nightjar Press.
Photo Credit: © Royal Literary Fund / Adïam Yemane
Previous Winners
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