The Novel Prize: 2020-24 winners bundle

A daughter and mother travel to Tokyo in autumn. How much is spoken between them, how much thought but unspoken? The inaugural winner of The Novel Prize, Jessica Au’s novel creates an enveloping atmosphere of tenderness and distance.

The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest. Winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

The joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, Tell is structured as a series of interviews with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide. Buckley’s twelfth novel, Tell is an exuberant, intensely fluid and probing examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own and of other people’s lives.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro is the 2024 winner of The Novel Prize. Recalling The Waves by Virginia Woolf, while drawing deep from Black American reality, this powerful and kaleidoscopic debut from an acclaimed American writer uses folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.