Tramp Press is delighted to announce that Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, published in May of this year, has been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize.
In being shortlisted, Mike McCormack joins the ranks of literary stars such as Howard Jacobson and Jim Crace, and previous winners Ali Smith, Eimear McBride and Kevin Barry.
The winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, worth £10,000, will be picked from the six-strong shortlist and announced at a ceremony in London on November 9th. Though the prize has twice been won by Irish writers, this year represents the first time a title from an Irish publisher has been shortlisted for the award.
‘I’m delighted to have been shortlisted for a prize which makes a point of honouring experimental fiction,’ Mike McCormack said. Meanwhile Lisa Coen, co-publisher at Tramp Press, comments: ‘’I’m over the moon. This shortlisting is a fantastic endorsement of Mike’s brave and original novel and reinforces what Sarah and I have been saying about trusting that readers will meet you halfway when you offer them strange new work.
This could not have happened without the Arts Council grant we were awarded to publish Solar Bones, and as such this is a good time to ask what other great novels could be up for major international awards if only the Irish government had sense enough to really back the arts, and give the Council a budget to match the ambition and talent in Ireland’s arts scene.’
As always, you can pick up a copy here or in your local bookshop.
SOLAR BONES Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a county engineer, comes back to the family house and considers the events that took him away – and that have brought him home again. Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. A beautiful and haunting elegy.
MIKE MCCORMACK is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. Getting it in the Head, his debut collection of short stories, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and one of its stories was adapted into an award-winning short film by Johnny O’Reilly. McCormack’s second novel, Notes from a Coma was described by the Irish Times as ‘the greatest Irish novel of the decade,’ and was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award. His second short story collection Forensic Songs appeared in 2012. Solar Bones is his third novel.
‘Solar Bones attempts the oldest and the most difficult feat, to take the prosaic and the everyday, the ordinary things of our existence, and to elevate them, and to transform them, by the forces of language. McCormack is one of our bravest and most innovative writers – he shoots for the stars with this one and does not fall short.‘ Kevin Barry
‘… hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny – Proust reconfigured by Flann O’Brien.‘ The Literary Review
‘Excellence is always rare and often unexpected: we don’t necessarily expect masterpieces even from the great. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes.‘ The Guardian
Contact Tramp Press: sarah@tramppress.com
Tramp Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council.
