Dead Ink Books has won the Republic of Consciousness prize for small presses for Missouri Williams’s “astonishing” debut novel The Doloriad. Yet while Dead Ink and Williams will get the prestige of winning, the entire shortlist will receive the same reward. Each of the five books wins £1,000, split 70:30 between publisher and author, on top of the £300 awarded to the 10 longlisted titles, which was paid to the presses only.
Prague-based Williams’s novel is set in the imagined wake of a mysterious disaster that has wiped out most of humanity. One family, descended from incest, remains, ruled by a merciless woman known only as the Matriarch. When the Matriarch believes there might be more survivors she sends one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering.
Writer and critic Lamorna Ash, who was on this year’s judging panel alongside poet Vanessa Onwuemezi and novelist Isabel Waidner, called The Doloriad “a superlative novel”.
“That such stylistic power is in service of a plot so strange, counter, original, its mood flashing between the tragic, comic and sublime in the most surprising sequencing, raises The Doloriad’s achievement to something astonishing,” she added.
The judges wanted to celebrate the fact that “indie presses like Dead Ink exist in the publishing industry to support and champion debuts as audacious as this,” she said.
Prize founder Neil Griffiths described The Doloriad as “a terrifying act of the imagination”, and Williams as “one of those rare writers who can work without limits, and take us to a place that is both unrecognisable and familiar. Which is to say she makes us acknowledge the darkness we know lies at the centre of ourselves.”
While The Doloriad is Williams’s first novel, her writing has appeared in publications such as Granta and Five Dials, and she is the co-editor of the feminist film journal Another Gaze.
First awarded in 2017, the Republic of Consciousness prize is given to the best literary novel published by a small press in the UK and Ireland with fewer than five employees. Over the past seven years the prize has awarded almost £100,000 to more than 25 small presses and writers.
In 2019, it split the prize among two authors and their publishers, criticising the “false hierarchy” of awards. In 2020, the prize shared the winnings equally among all five shortlisted publishers, and since 2021 a portion of the winnings has also been awarded to the 10 publishers on the longlist. Although this year the prize money has been divided similarly, the 2023 prize’s total of £8,000 is the lowest amount since the award’s inaugural year due to loss of funding. Griffiths said he hopes to be back up to a pot of at least at £10,000 next year.
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Joining Dead Ink on the shortlist were Pilot Press for My Dead Book by Nate Lippens, Rough Trade Books for I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, Tenement Press for Mueum by SJ Fowler and Tilted Axis for Chinatown by Thuận translated by Nguyễn An Lý.
Previous winners of the award include Jacaranda for Lote by Shola von Reinhold and Fitzcarraldo Editions for Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne.
