The shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023, celebrating fiction at its most novel, has been announced.

The judging panel have narrowed down more than 100 submissions into a shortlist of mould-breaking books, with six authors in the running for the £10,000 literary prize.

For over 10 years, the Goldsmiths Prize, in partnership with the New Statesman, has rewarded fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best.

Authors Helen Oyeyemi and Maddie Mortimer, the New Statesman’s Ellen Peirson-Hagger, and lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, Tom Lee, formed the judging panel for 2023.

Dr Tom Lee, Chair of Judges said: “From the 107 books submitted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023, the judges have chosen a shortlist that more than meets the Prize’s mission to celebrate fiction that pushes the boundaries of what the novel can do.

“What struck us was the sheer ambition and invention on display in these six wildly different books.  From a wickedly funny and subversive journey through 1960’s counterculture to a multi-voiced millenia straddling account of a saint and the cathedral built to honour him; from a story of revolutionary France that subverts all the rules of historical fiction to engage explicitly with our contemporary moment to a searing and beautiful account of marriage and loss in the fog and drama of the Lake District; from a mind-bending queer coming of age novel set in a limbo-like world of lost dreams and disappointments to work that uses a minute focus on a day in the life of a woman and her baby to perform a profound meditation on the idea of the novel itself.

“This is a shortlist that shows the novel – that most slippery and vital of forms – continuing to morph and reinvent itself in ways that surprise and delight us.”