The Republic of Consciousness Prize was established by author Neil Griffiths with £2,000 of his own money to celebrate “small presses producing brilliant and brave literary fiction” in the UK and Ireland. Small presses being defined as having fewer than five full-time employees.
The first Prize was awarded in 2017 to John Keene’s ‘Counternarratives’ (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and subsequent winners have been Eley Williams’ ‘Attrib. and Other Stories’ (Influx Press) in 2018, Will Eaves for ‘Murmur’ (CB Editions) in 2019, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo took home the prize for ‘Animalia’ in 2020, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions), 2021 Jacaranda Books took the main gong for ‘Lote’ by Shola von Reinhold, 2022 it was Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s ‘Happy Stories, Mostly’, translated by Tiffany Tsao (Tilted Axis Press) , 2023 ‘The Doloriad’ by Missouri Williams (Dead Ink Books) won the award and last year it was won by ‘Of Cattle and Men’ by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry & published by Charco Press.
Yesterday the longlist for the 2025 Prize was announced. Here are those books (listed in no particular order, as the Prize has chosen to do, with the blurbs directly from the publisher, with links to the publisher’s page for the longlisted book).
‘Daybook’ by Nathan Knapp (Splice)
How can a person speak when they lose faith in the authority of their voice? One night on the cusp of winter, a man sits alone, in silence, and begins to lay words on an empty page. He speaks of ancestry and stymied ambitions, of confusions and doubts, of what he despises and what he adores. He speaks of scripture and commandments, of conformity and evangelism; he speaks of the lust and the shame that have led him away from a doctrinaire upbringing, and of the love that has sheltered him in his spiritual exile. And yet, in order to speak of these things, he finds he must speak back to things he has already said: so he returns to his earlier words and casts doubt on their veracity, to elucidate the implications that were lost when he wrote them down.
‘Invisible Dogs’ by Charles Boyle (CB Editions)
‘Invisible Dogs’ is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs – but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city.
‘There’s A Monster Behind The Door’ by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood & Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (Bullaun)
The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own.
This is La Réunion in the 1980s: high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. One little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents’ reign of terror and turns to school for salvation.
Rich in the history of the island’s customs and superstitions, and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirize the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.
‘Mother Naked’ by Glen James Brown (Peninsula Press)
The City of Durham, 1434. Out of a storm, an aging minstrel arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city’s most powerful men.
Mother Naked is his name, and the story he’s come to tell is the Legend of the Fell Wraith: the gruesome ‘walking ghost’ some say slaughtered the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier.
But is this monster only a myth, born from the dim minds of toiling peasants? Or does the Wraith – and do the murders – have roots in real events suffered by those fated to a lifetime of labour? As Mother Naked weaves the strands of the mystery – of class, religion, art, and ale – it starts to seem as though the chilling truth might be closer to his privileged audience than they could ever imagine.
Taking its inspiration from a single payment entered into Durham’s Cathedral rolls, ‘Modyr Nakett’ was the lowest-paid performer in over 200 years of records. Set against the traumatic shadow of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt, Mother Naked speaks back from the margins in a fury of imaginative recuperation.
‘Célina’ by Catherine Axelrad, translated by Philip Terry (Les Fugitives)
By the age of fifteen, Célina has lost her father to the sea, a brother to suicide, a sister to tuberculosis, her virginity to a wolfish man at the inn where she was waitressing, and the job at the inn when another servant informed on her. In the Channel Islands of the 1850s, Alderney is not yet the tourist paradise filled with luxury cars it is today. When the chance arises to leave and work in Hauteville House for the Victor Hugo household during their exile in Guernsey, it is Célina’s first glimpse of a different kind of life. Axelrad sheds a new light on the complexity of Hugo’s persona, and on the sexual and class dynamics at play in the proprietary, yet strangely tender relationship between the maid and le grand homme.
‘Somewhere Else’ by Jenni Daiches (Scotland Street Press)
Rosa Roshkin is five years old when her family are murdered in a pogrom and she is forced to leave behind everything she knows with only a suitcase of clothes and her father’s violin.
‘Somewhere Else’ is an epic generational novel about womanhood and Judaeo-Scottish experience across two World Wars, the creation of Israel and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A novel which explores today’s most difficult and urgent questions, not least of which: how to find identity in displacement.
‘Crooked Seeds’ by Karen Jennings (Holland House Books)
Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home…
In a Cape Town where water is rationed and has to be collected from trucks each day, with the consequences of apartheid and the ending of it still evident, Deidre lives from day to day in squalor – largely created by herself – borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyone she knows. Then she is contacted by the police, and taken by a respectful constable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in a shattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she has to accept the truth of her past, and of her older brother, her parents’ golden boy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it truly is to be a victim.
’How to Leave the World’ by Marouane Bakhti, translated by Lara Vergnaud (Divided Publishing)
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, ‘How to Leave the World’ is a beautiful non-answer.
‘The Seers’ by Sulaiman Adonia (Prototype)
‘The Seers’ follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.
Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, ‘The Seers’ moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and erotic lives of its characters as their identities are shaped, but refused to be suppressed, by the bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system.
‘Good Lord’ by Ella Frears (Rough Trade)
Rough Trade Books website appears to be down at present (a blank page!) so here is the comments from the Republic of Consciousness Prize judges, “A taut, brilliantly sustained novel in fluent verse. A mordantly witty tirade against the dark forces of toxic masculinity and the Wild West that is today’s property rental market.”
Each long listed press receives a gift of ₤500, at the end of February a shortlist will be announced with each press receiving a further ₤1,000 to be split 70% press / 30% writer (and translator), the winner receives glory only (no further prizemoney) and will be announced on 1 April 2025.
The Prize is funded through subscriptions, and joining their “Book of the Month” club helps to fund future awards, you receive 12 titles per year and can join here.
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