Lucy Ellmann's long sentence leads to Goldsmiths shortlist

Prize for mould-breaking fiction lists Ducks, Newburyport alongside innovative works by Mark Haddon, Deborah Levy, Amy Arnold, Vesna Main and Isabel Waidner

Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, a 1,000-page novel written mostly in one sentence, is already shortlisted for the Booker prize. Now Ellman has made it on to the final line-up for the Goldsmiths prize, a £10,000 award celebrating “fiction at its most novel”.

Published by Norwich independent press Galley Beggar, Ellman is one of six writers in the running for the Goldsmiths, which goes to “fiction that breaks the mould and extends the possibilities of the novel form”. Judge Sjón called Ducks, Newburyport “a massive achievement of a novel, which plays masterfully on every one of the reader’s senses”. Told through the perspective of an Ohio woman, it is, he said, “an inspired demonstration of what it’s like to be the warm vanishing point of a hostile universe”, and is “as playful and urgent, humanist and unflinching, as the other big novels that precede it in the literary canon”.

The shortlist is a reminder that the novel remains a flexible and innovative form

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