Gordon Burn Prize 2021

This darkly comic novel about resistance, radicalism and redemption explores themes of society, illness and isolation. Maya is homeless and, when her site is razed by the authorities, she’s detained. Maya is given a lifeline when a tech company looking to enhance its profile offers her a job and somewhere to live. The only condition is that Maya must document her progress on Instagram to show that anyone can be productive and perfect. Yet Maya realises that sickness is a kind of revolution. With other outcasts, Maya starts a movement: billboards promoting wellness are defaced all over London and her media feed is flooded with obscene, filthy and provocative images.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s hybrid of essay and autofiction weaves together the stories of two women living in different times. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that reaches across the centuries. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life. The poem becomes an obsession for her as she sets out to discover the full story behind it. A Ghost in the Throat charts the ways in which a life can be changed by a work of art created centuries before.

In this exhilarating and profound series of essays, Hanif Abdurraqib delivers a meditation on Black performance in the modern age that reaches back through the lives of musicians, cultural figures, history and his own life. In rhythmic prose, Abdurraqib peels away layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and his own personal history of love and grief – whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds of ‘Gimme Shelter’ in which Merry Clayton sings, or the magnificent hours of Aretha Franklin’s homegoing; Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show or a schoolyard fistfight; Dave Chapelle’s skits or a game of spades among friends.

Jenni Fagan’s third novel is the story of 10 Luckenbooth Close, an archetypal Edinburgh tenement. Luckenbooth begins in 1910 when the devil’s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents – a curse that will last for the rest of the century. Over nine decades, 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls. An infamous madam, a famous Beat poet and a coal miner who fears daylight are amongst the residents whose lives are plagued by the building’s troubled history.

Mrs Death, a Black, working-class woman with the ability to shape-shift, is given the chance to tell her story in this absorbing novel. Exhausted from spending eternity doing her job, an exasperated Mrs Death is seeking an opportunity to unburden her conscience when she comes across Wolf Willeford. Wolf is a troubled young writer who thinks he already knows Death until he finally meets her. Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death’s scribe, and begins to write her memoirs. As the two reflect on the losses they have experienced, their friendship grows into a surprising affirmation of hope, resilience and love.

Emerging from a destructive relationship, Tabitha Lasley leaves her job as a magazine journalist and moves from London to Aberdeen to research a book about the oil industry and the men who work on the rigs. As Lasley immerses herself in offshore culture and adapts to Aberdeen’s harsh climate, she is increasingly drawn inside the lives of the people she is writing about, blurring the boundaries between author and subject. When she begins a relationship with a married rig worker, she falls into an intense and potentially dangerous personal journey that pulls her even deeper into the subculture around her. Sea State is a fluidly written, dramatic and insightful memoir.

David Keenan grew up in Airdrie in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He is the author of England’s Hidden Reverse and a senior critic at The Wire. His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn and Collyer Bristow Prizes and was a Book of the Month for Waterstones, Rough Trade and Caught by the River.

US-based writer Jesse Ball has written more than ten books of prose and poetry, but Census is his first UK publication.

Denise Mina has published 12 novels including the Garnethill series, Paddy Meehan and Alex Morrow series.

David Szalay is the author of three previous novels: Spring, The Innocent and London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. In 2013 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Dan Davies is a journalist, author and editor with more than twenty years’ experience as a senior staffer and freelance contributor on a wide variety of magazines, newspapers and websites.

Paul Kingsnorth is the author of two non-fiction books, One No, Many Yeses and Real England, a collection of poetry, Kidland, and two novels.

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham. His novel Beastings (2014) won the Portico Prize For Literature and a Northern Writers’ Award and was longlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.