Single sentence novel wins Goldsmiths prize for books that 'break the mould'

Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones takes £10,000 prize, making him the third Irish author to win in four years

A novel written in a single sentence has won the 2016 Goldsmiths prize, becoming the third Irish winner in the four-year history of an award set up to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form”.

Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is set on All Souls Day in November 2008 and takes place inside the mind of Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer from County Mayo in the west of Ireland, who is brought back from the dead to contemplate “a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles […] blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer-houses and hermitages […] a bordered realm of penance and atonement”.

Related: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack review – an extraordinary hymn to small-town Ireland

Related: Goldsmiths prize and Anakana Schofield – books podcast

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