The Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the voice for the value of literature in the UK, has today announced Francis Spufford as the winner of the 2022 Encore Award for Light Perpetual (Faber & Faber), a tender, endlessly inventive novel that resurrects five children killed in a wartime bomb-blast and asks what kind of a future these working-class youths would have had. The annual Encore Award of £10,000 celebrates outstanding achievements in second novels.
Francis Spufford said: ‘I’m unusually old for a second-time novelist, having taken so long to get up my courage to write fiction – but that makes me all the more grateful, and all the more heartened, for the vote of confidence the Encore Award represents. It’s a beacon for writers of any age who are negotiating the tricky territory that follows a first book. It’s a call to persist, as you discover how rich and how plural the art is in which you’re taking your second step.’
This year’s judges, Sian Cain, Nikesh Shukla and Paul Muldoon, said: ‘If the defining characteristic of fiction is “making it up,” Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual is a triumph in the form. Opening with an actual V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths in 1944 that killed 168 people, Spufford invents five children and imagines their lives as if they did not die that day, telling their alternative histories through the 20th century. This version of “what might have been” affords us memorable and moving insights into what we have come to think of as our own reality. Light Perpetual is a bold and poignant novel, one that encourages the reader to fully comprehend that the lives of others, even people they have not and will never meet, are as vivid and filled with meaning as their own; a remarkable work of empathy. This is an assured second novel from Spufford, who has fast become one of Britain’s most exciting fiction writers after his debut Golden Hill. It is a great pleasure to award this novel the Encore, and to wonder at what he might write next’
Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Light Perpetual was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.
The Encore Award was first presented in 1990 to celebrate the achievement of outstanding second novels. The Award fills a niche in the catalogue of literary prizes. The RSL has administrated the award since 2016.
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The Encore Award is one of 10 annual awards and prizes presented by the RSL, which bring the widest possible community of writers and readers together in celebration of the breadth of literature today. From debut works and unpublished short stories, through to the notoriously challenging second novel and outstanding contributions to literature, the RSL’s awards and prizes celebrate the value of writing in all its forms, whilst supporting emerging and established writers at some of the most challenging moments of their careers. The RSL’s other annual awards and prizes are: RSL International Writers awards, Companions of Literature, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the RSL Christopher Bland Prize, the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards for Non-Fiction, the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, the RSL Literature Matters Awards, the Sky Arts RSL Writers Awards and the Benson Medal.
