Ruins, Child

Winner of the 2024 Novel Prize

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro is the 2024 winner of The Novel Prize, previously won by Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken and Tell by Jonathan Buckley. View a special offer on the four winning books.

Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, Giada Scodellaro’s debut novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast (often vernacular, often overheard: ‘The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless’).

It’s a book which seems to be drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalisation. ‘Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.’ Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.

WINNER: The Novel Prize 2024
LONGLISTED: The First Novel Prize 2026

Read an excerpt published in LitHub.

Giada Scodellaro is one of the most astonishing writers of her generation and Ruins, Child is a visionary novel. Scodellaro refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience. The result is a masterpiece that lives and breathes on the page, every sentence shimmering with wit, musicality, brilliance and verve.
Katie Kitamura

Giada Scodellaro’s newest masterpiece, Ruins, Child, endows the concept and form of the contemporary novel with new force and meaning. Cinematic and prismatic, like a camera constantly in motion and yet incisive in its close portraitures of a community of Black women and fems surviving and living amidst the future urban, eco-dystopic, queer ruins of our society, Scodellaro’s novel breaks new ground in spectacular fashion.
John Keene

Ruins, Child takes us to the crumbling architecture of a future past; a future past that is possibly now. In this work of fractal seeing, we encounter women in lives that are simultaneously lived, reenacted, and observed. Ruins, Child is conceptually rich, prismatic, and choral, embodied, and surreal, cinematic and textual. Giada Scodellaro writes us Black life watching Black life.
Dionne Brand

Her prose makes the borders of genre feel irrelevant… What matters is Scodellaro’s exhilarating freedom of mind.
Julia Conrad

Mesmerising… For readers willing to surrender to the sway and creep of Scodallero’s prose, it can feel much like watching an art house film, where, as one of the novel’s characters puts it, “we are lost in the potential of this scene.” The result is an arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected.
Publishers Weekly

This finely-crafted web of overlapping viewpoints forms a multilayered portrait of the Black woman figure and her life – and the effect is undeniably original. The collage of scenes holds an array of arresting detail that is striking, humorous, and surrealist in nature. Scodellaro breaks the novel form to experiment with its limits.
Brooklyn Rail

Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child is a deserving victor [of The Novel Prize], and the kind of literary fiction that pushes narrative form and technique in a way that makes comparisons – such as to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – seem like bare approximations… It’s fiction of startling originality, precise intelligence and style.
Sydney Morning Herald (Fiction book of the week)

A gorgeous work of collective witness set against an urban landscape… Conjuring the spirit of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ruins, Child weaves folklore, botany and the body – always the body… a surrealist, cinematic telling with an eye towards the future.
Electric Literature