Judges praise fable inspired by the author’s late brother as perfect match for prize’s ambition to reward writing ‘that dares to enter history’
A fable inspired by the author Jesse Ball’s late brother, who had Down’s syndrome, has won the Gordon Burn prize.
The American author’s Census, which follows a terminally ill father and his son as they conduct a survey of a nameless country, beat works including Guy Gunaratne’s Booker-longlisted novel In Our Mad and Furious City to the £5,000 award at the Durham book festival on Thursday evening. The prize is for work that follows in the footsteps of Burn – “novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; non-fiction adventurous enough to inhabit characters and events in order to create new and vivid realities” – and has been won in the past by writers including Paul Kingsnorth and Benjamin Myers.
Related: Census by Jesse Ball review – a moving portrayal of radical innocence
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