Scodellaro wins 2024 Novel Prize

Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions have announced Ruins, Child, a debut novel from Giada Scodellaro, as the winner of the 2024 Novel Prize. The novel was chosen from 1100 submissions.

‘Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower’, Ruins, Child is ‘kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard,’ said the publishers in a statement. They continued: ‘It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: Scodellaro’s female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalisation. A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.’

Scodellaro said, ‘I am so humbled, so thrilled, so in awe of this outcome. What a dream it is for this work to exist outside of myself. A collaboration with the extraordinary New Directions, Fitzcarraldo and Giramondo affords Ruins, Child an urgent and expansive opportunity – a life.’

The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English open to published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers US$10,000 (AU$15,745) to the winner and simultaneous publication by New Directions in the US, Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Ireland, and Giramondo in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

The inaugural winner of the Novel Prize was Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au in 2020. In 2022, the award was shared jointly between Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over and Jonathan Buckley’s Tell.

Ruins, Child will be published in early 2026.

Category: International news