Longlist announced for Gordon Burn Prize 2022
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The twelve-strong longlist for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 has been announced (Wednesday 29 June), revealing the year’s boldest and most exciting fiction and non-fiction.
With settings from Albania to Australia and London’s Turkish community to the Outer Hebrides, the wide-ranging 2022 longlist features titles by debut writers alongside those from multi-award-winning authors. The list includes fiction, true crime, memoir, music and sport.
Founded in 2012, the Gordon Burn Prize has, over the past decade, built a reputation for identifying and celebrating brilliant books that often find their readers outside the mainstream.
The prize covers both fiction and non-fiction, awarding works that are fearless in their ambition and execution, often pushing boundaries, crossing genres, or otherwise challenging readers’ expectations.
Hanif Abdurraqib won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2021 for his book A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Previous winners have included Peter Pomerantsev’s This Is Not Propaganda, a study on the war against reality; David Keenan’s novel For the Good Times, set during the height of the Troubles in 1970s Belfast; Denise Mina’s true crime novel The Long Drop; and In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies.
The prize is run in partnership by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North, Faber & Faber and Durham Book Festival. It remembers the Newcastle-born writer Gordon Burn, who died in 2009, and seeks to celebrate those who follow in his footsteps. A journalist and author of ten books, Burn’s work includes the novels Alma Cogan and Fullalove and non-fiction titles Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker and Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West.
The 2022 longlist was selected by the judges, sportswriter and columnist Jonathan Liew, author Denise Mina (chair), broadcaster Stuart Maconie, artist Heather Phillipson and writer Chitra Ramaswamy. The judges will also be selecting the shortlist (to be announced in August 2022) and the winning title.
The winner of the Gordon Burn Prize will be announced at Durham Book Festival, a Durham County Council festival, on Thursday 13 October 2022. The winning writer will receive £5,000 and the chance to undertake a three-month retreat at Gordon Burn’s cottage in the Scottish Borders.
The Gordon Burn Prize 2022 longlist is:
About a Son (Phoenix), David Whitehouse
Aftermath (And Other Stories), Preti Taneja
Case Study (Saraband), Graeme Macrae Burnet
Companion Piece (Hamish Hamilton), Ali Smith
Constructing a Nervous System (Granta), Margo Jefferson
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Allen Lane), Lea Ypi
Keeping the House (And Other Stories), Tice Cin
Oxblood (Bloomsbury), Tom Benn
The Perfect Golden Circle (Bloomsbury Circus), Benjamin Myers
Scary Monsters (Atlantic), Michelle de Kretser
Wayward (White Rabbit), Vashti Bunyan
Your Show (Faber), Ashley Hickson-Lovence