Cuddy: Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize

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Griffiths, Neil. "The Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist". TLS. Archived from the original on 21 September 2020.

But here, in Cuddy, I feel that Myers has excelled himself. Here we have all the poetry and intensity of his writing, all the excellence of his historical fiction and it is all mixed together with some literary experimentation that makes you think Myers is really going places with his writing. The triumphant new novel from the Walter Scott Prize-winning author of The Gallows Pole and The Offing The triumphant new novel from Myers was announced as the winner of the Goldsmiths Prizein association with the New Statesman, at a ceremony in London on Wednesday 8 November 2023.

Cuddy is told (mainly) in four distinct parts, all written in unique styles and telling a different part of the legend and myth of St Cuthbert over more than 1,000 years in the north of England. Benjamin Myers has long made the stories of northern England his own: The Offing (2019) renders the region as a nation, apart and distinct; The Gallows Pole (2017) tells a bleak tale of injustice in 18th-century Yorkshire. Cuddy continues this journey of exploration, but now the form is more experimental and the writing more incantatory, as Myers traces just some of the manifold threads of history to remarkable effect. Neil Hegarty The Revd Dr Sarah Foot is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Dean Designate.

In this unique new novel by Benjamin Myers, the story of Cuddy is retold and reworked to take place over multiple centuries after the saint’s death in 687AD. In fact, most of Cuthbert’s story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety. While his actual life is mostly myth and legend, his posthumous wanderings are points of fact and history. He was known as Cuddy. He was first a monk, next a bishop, then a hermit and later a saint. They say his body is incorruptible. They say he performs miracles.Myers, Benjamin (2005). Green Day: American idiots & the new punk explosion. Church Stretton: Independent Music Press. ISBN 0-9539942-9-5. OCLC 64553821. Pig Iron (2012) was set in the traveller/gypsy community of the north-east of England and was the first to be published under his full name Benjamin Myers. Published by Bluemoose Books, it won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize [8] and was longlisted for 3:AM Magazine.com's 'Novels of the Year' [9] and runner-up in The Guardian's 'Not The Booker Prize', [10] in the same year. I want to ask you what’s next but I also don’t want to, as with Ben Myers the surprise is part of the joy of reading. So, if not what’s next, perhaps what’s the book you’d write if there were no limits? The one that makes you think, “Could I?”. Cuddy is an absolute masterpiece in my opinion. I am, admittedly, a Benjamin Myers fan and have read nearly every book he's published so far. So I was excited to see this come out so soon after The Perfect Golden Circle.

Benjaminwill appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival, in conversation with Goldsmiths Prize judgeMaddie Mortimerwhose first novelMaps of Our Spectacular Bodieswas shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize and won the Desmond Elliott Prize, andTom Gatti executive editor at theNew Statesman. ProfessorFrancesCorner OBE, Warden ofGoldsmiths, University of London said: “The Goldsmiths Prize is a unique recognition of authors who dare to challenge convention – and with the support of our media partner The New Statesman, it has grown into an important, distinctive fixture in the literary calendar here in the UK. Writing Durham: Ben Myers. 7 August 2019. Archived from the original on 22 December 2021 . Retrieved 7 August 2019. Recipient of the Roger Deakin Award and first published by Bluemoose Books, Myers' novel The Gallows Pole was published to acclaim in 2017 and was winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2018 - the world's largest prize for historical fiction. It has been published in the US by Third Man Books and in 2023 was adapted by director Shane Meadows for the BBC/A24.Section 1, a kind of epic poem telling the story of the Haliwerfolc, a group of dedicated monks and others who carried Cuddy's body around the north to help it avoid desecration by the invading vikings, is glorious. It's one of the best passages I have ever read. Inventive, vivid, strange and peopled with great characters, it had me crying 'masterpiece!'. From life in a brutal eighteenth-century coiners gang ( The Gallows Pole) to a late 1980s public obsession with crop circles ( The Perfect Golden Circle); where do you get your limitless inspiration from?