Shortlist announced for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022

Five titles have been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022, a celebration of the year’s boldest and most innovative fiction and non-fiction.

The 2022 shortlist was selected by the judges, sportswriter and columnist Jonathan Liew, author Denise Mina (chair), broadcaster Stuart Maconie, artist and poet Heather Phillipson and writer Chitra Ramaswamy.

The judges will also be selecting the winning title, to be announced at Durham Book Festival on Thursday 13 October.

Founded in 2012, the Gordon Burn Prize has, over the past decade, built a reputation for identifying and celebrating brilliant works that often find their readers outside of the mainstream. The prize covers both fiction and non-fiction, recognising writing that often pushes boundaries, crosses genres, or otherwise challenges readers’ expectations.

This year’s shortlist includes memoir, creative non-fiction, true crime and fiction in works that are expansive in form and ambition, and unflinchingly explore themes from radical compassion to the nature of sanity to the duty that comes with freedom.

The prize is run in partnership by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North, Faber & Faber and Durham Book Festival, a Durham County Council 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 Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel and non-fiction titles Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker and Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West.

The winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 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 shortlist is:

About a Son (Phoenix), David Whitehouse

Aftermath (And Other Stories), Preti Taneja

Case Study (Saraband), Graeme Macrae Burnet

Constructing a Nervous System (Granta), Margo Jefferson

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Allen Lane), Lea Ypi