Giada Scodellaro: a note on Ruins, Child (2024 Novel Prize winner)

Giada Scodellaro reflects on her debut novel Ruins, Child (Giramondo, 2026), winner of the 2024 winner Novel Prize. The book is set in what may be the future, and centres on six women sharing space in a crumbling apartment tower. It was described by Katie Kitamura as ‘a visionary novel…[that] refracts and redefines the canon of Black culture, the archive of Black experience.’

It is an interesting thing, to revisit a work and consider its origin. Ruins, Child, then, is a work gathered/rooted in landscape – the salt marsh of the Hutchinson River. That is to say, I write first toward stillness. Always public and domestic spaces, collective movement, and a granular examination of proximity and discomfort. The unfolding leg as an opportunity to recount, to mark the slow body. Within the close-up everyone eats, everyone approaches. How to create an examination of the expanse, but also the corner, dust? 

A woman both gathering and dying – split. Bedridden/swimming, pregnant/unpregnant, bereaved. Humming underneath is the celebration of a holiday as a relic. A face like Mahalia Jackson. I ask myself, ‘Have they always been watching this film?’ ‘What do they hope to outlive?’ Perhaps: the sterling silver, the crease of the thigh, a decibel, the poplar and the paper birch tree, the underside. ‘Okay, boom’, what developed later was a rumor, we noticed. Syncopation, recitation, the neighbors covering ground, a week of exits. Otherwise, delayed possibility. Objects shifting overnight, water spilling from a glass. More protein. Lines from a pillow set upon a face, bed sores, stretch marks on the stomach, low vision, soil/soiled, scooping out the debris, $15 copays, pining for a road trip across, or a child.