Mayo author wins £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize

A BOOK written by a Mayo-born author has won this year’s Goldsmiths Prize in London.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, who grew up in Louisburgh and now resides in Galway, was last night named the winner of the £10,000 award which recognises fiction at its most novel.

Solar Bones was published by Tramp Press, a small independent press in Dublin.

McCormack’s novel, which was last month’s Irish Times Book Club choice, was praised for its remarkable narrative which unfolds in one unbroken sentence and as a formally innovative novel which is also a moving and compelling read.

It follows the stream-of-consciousness recollections of a man named Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer from the west of Ireland briefly returned from the dead on All Souls Day, November 2008.

McCormack is the fourth winner of the prize founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London and held in partnership with the New Statesman, and the third Irish writer to win after Kevin Barry last year with Beatlebone and Eimear McBride in 2013 with A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Ali Smith won in 2014 with How To Be Both.

Solar Bones was one of three Irish works on a shortlist of six chosen after 111 works were submitted for the prize. The others included The Lesser Bohemians by Castlebar's Eimear McBride.