Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann has won the £10,000 (about $12,855) Goldsmiths Prize, which aims to "reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." Chair of judges Erica Wagner called Ducks, Newburyport "that rare thing: a book which, not long after its publication, one can unhesitatingly call a masterpiece. In her gripping and hypnotic book, Ellmann remakes the novel and expands the reader's idea of what is possible with the form."
The organization described the book this way: "Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless information that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of 'happy couples,' Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks 'n' beans? A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder--and a revolution in the novel."
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Lot by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books) has won the $15,000 2019 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Sponsored by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the award recognizes "outstanding work from promising African-American fiction writers" and honors Ernest J. Gaines, the acclaimed writer who died last week at the age of 86. The award is in its 13th year.
The judges said that Lot, a collection of short stories, is "set in the city of Houston, particularly its East End. The narrator is a young man who often doesn't feel at home in his hometown and keenly watches others as they desperately struggle or thrive."
Washington's fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Boston Review, and other publications. He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Houston and a master's in creative writing from the University of New Orleans. He is a lecturer at Rice University.