Giada Scodellaro is the winner of the 2024 Novel Prize
Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce that Giada Scodellaro has won the 2024 Novel Prize for her debut novel Ruins, Child.
The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers US$10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo, in North America by New York-based New Directions, and in the UK and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Selected from 1,100 submissions, Giada Scodellaro’s novel will be published in early 2026.
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 irreducibly original. Remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth, Giada Scodellaro’s debut novel is like a precious old mirror: dropped, looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the 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 seemingly 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 marginalization. ‘Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.’ A surreal musing, 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.
Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. She is a queer writer and artist whose writings have appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB, and Harper’s, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency fellow. Her debut collection, Some of Them Will Carry Me, was named one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2022.
Giada Scodellaro, on being told of winning the prize, replied: ‘I am so humbled, so thrilled, so in awe of this outcome. What a dream it is for this work to exist outside of myself. A collaboration with the extraordinary New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, and Giramondo affords Ruins, Child an urgent and expansive opportunity – a life.’
