The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel

"Other prizes of note include the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which was won in 2022 by Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness , a novel that gives voices to inanimate objects; the Goldsmiths Prize (for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”), which went to the collaborative novel Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams—a clever portrait of literary friendship and an experiment in political fiction; and the James Tait Black Prize, the UK’s oldest literary prize, which went to Keith Ridgway’s A Shock , in which each chapter forms a series of interlocking stories about characters living in South London. The International Dublin Literary Award, worth €100,000 is one of the world’s richest literary prizes, and is awarded to a novel published in the English language, or translated into English, that year. It was won this year by the French author Alice Zeniter for The Art of Losing , as translated by Frank Wynne. The novel follows three generations of an Algerian family from the 1950s to the present day."

"This book does two things really well. The first is shifting to the hallucinatory world to the context of loss and grief. Lots of people experience these sorts of things following the loss of a loved one, and that happens to Benny as well. Secondly, this is a book about books. It’s steeped in books, much of it unfolds in a library, and in a way it’s about how we create different worlds constantly. We can move between them, and they shape how we think. The boundaries between these fictional worlds and the real world is much more porous and malleable than we might appreciate. I’ve done work previously as part of ‘Hearing the Voice’ with readers and writers where writers talk about characters that end up talking for themselves and readers talk about characters who keep speaking to them after the book has finished or stay with them in some way. The ways in which we engage with fiction to create very, very complex imaginary worlds is one of the most startling things the human mind can do. And it’s still a relatively misunderstood phenomenon."