The fantastical and the familiar merge in this energetic inquiry into class politics and cultural capital
It is 2024. In a city known simply as “the international capital”, writer Corey Fah’s life has taken a swerve. At a public online event, they have been declared the £10,000 winner of the Fictionalisation of Social Evils award for their “MIND-BENDING” debut novel. Sitting with their partner in a one-bed flat on a 1960s social housing estate that is overrun with knotweed and boasts a single shop selling stationery, toiletries, guns and meat, Corey can hardly believe it. “I’d not won an award before, and neither had anybody I knew.”
In 2021 at a public online event, Isabel Waidner was announced the winner of the Goldsmiths prize for their third novel, Sterling Karat Gold. One of the judges congratulated Waidner for their ability to combine “the real and the mythic, the beautiful and the grotesque, to mind-bending effect”. Because of lockdown, however, the Goldsmiths art department was closed, so no one was able to make the usual customised trophy. Waidner received the £10,000 prize money on its own. Corey Fah is less fortunate. They will only get the money if they can track down the missing trophy themselves. “Do it quickly,” the prize coordinator says, “before the judges change their minds.”
