C.D. Rose has won the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize.

C. D. Rose has won this year’s Goldsmiths Prize for his novel We Live Here Now.

Described in the press copy as “DeLillo meets Kafka,” the novel sounds absolutely wild—as befits a winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, which was launched in 2013 “to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form” and has been won by the likes of Ali Smith, Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, and Rachel Cusk. The prize comes with a £10,000 purse and was judged this year by Mark Haddon, Megan Nolan, Simon Okotie, and Amy Sackville (jury chair).

Sackville had this to say about the novel:

A book about what art is and what it does (or doesn’t do), C.D. Rose’s We Live Here Now in its turn asks profound questions of the contemporary world and the systems that power it, in the aether, deep under the surface, far out at sea. Motifs emerge and recur: containers, erasures, shady markets, sound and silence, ‘echo and drone’. This constellatory novel tests the bounds of the form while delivering all of its satisfactions: at once hilarious and deeply haunting, intellectually challenging and supremely entertaining.

The other shortlisted books this year were Colwell Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Catch, Sarah Hall’s Helm, Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project, and Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House—and if you are a fan of adventurous writing, the kind that pushes the limits of what a book can do, you’d do a lot worse than reading any of these tremendously fun and strange novels.