Interview with Tim Parnell of The Goldsmiths Prize
Dr Tim Parnell is Literary Director of The Goldsmiths Prize. In this interview Tim shares how The Goldsmiths Prize began and reflects on the outlook for the novel form.
You set up the Goldsmiths Prize back in 2013 – why did you want to establish a prize like this?
I had a strong sense that the sort of novels I taught and found most interesting were not the kind of books that were winning prizes. To me, there seemed to be an unnecessarily wide gap between the novel as it was perceived in mainstream literary culture and as it was taught and understood in university syllabi. I also felt that people were often ignoring really interesting books because they were perceived as too challenging. The Turner Prize also influenced my thinking. It intrigued me that it had transformed art that was once vilified and dismissed into something that people happily queued up to see. I could see how a prize could make a cultural intervention and help to make the marginal and ‘difficult’ popular – that’s what we’re trying to do with the Goldsmiths Prize, in a way.
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years on the future of the novel. What do you think is the outlook for the novel form in today’s digital age?
Will Self, among others, thinks the death of the novel is coming – I don’t think it is. The Prize along with the New Statesman runs a lecture series on Why the Novel Matters, and our speakers are hugely positive about the things the novel can do and say that other forms can’t. I would say the novel form is almost infinitely variable, and it will last as long as people use language. Innovation is important, though. You must keep re-vivifying the novel: I think it dies when it becomes a conventional and predictable form.
Read the full piece on my blog.