Will Eaves, an Associate Professor from the University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, has been nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize 2018 for his novel Murmur.

The winner is due to be announced on the 14^th November.

Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world.

Commenting on Murmur, Will Eaves said:

“I’m not a mathematician, but I am interested in certain issues to do with the nature of consciousness.

"I’m also trying to suggest something about how a hard-line material scientist would approach the problem of pain and desolation. And my guess is that he would have tried to get very interested in it.

“Murmur tries to find a dramatic paraphrase for Turing’s physical, mental and political predicament. It asks: how does one fit the personal experience of trauma into a material conception of the world?”

Formerly Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Will Eaves is the author of four novels and two collections of poetry. The opening section of Murmur was shortlisted for the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award.

Commenting on the shortlisting the Goldsmith Prize’s Chair of Judges, Professor Adam Mars-Jones, said:

“The shortlist for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize, now in its sixth year, offers a tasting menu of all that is fresh and inventive in contemporary British and Irish fiction.

“There’s a harsh view of the past in Will Eaves’ Murmur, restaging the travails of a brilliant gay mathematician modelled on Alan Turing”.

Commenting on Murmur fellow judge Deborah Levy said:

“Murmur is a novel of multiple ideas, which seems right given its main protagonist, Alec Pryor, is loosely based on the predicament of the philosophical mathematician, Alan Turing. It is also a novel forged from an immensely beautiful writing intelligence. Murmur is a fully achieved literary experiment, digging deep into all the dimensions of human consciousness, including state sanctioned savagery.

“If its organising themes range from artificial intelligence, desire, sexuality, the limits of human understanding, the risks involved in love, it is also an investigation into the codes of language itself. At time, Eaves shamanistically thinks himself into the dreams of his gentle protagonist, a man who is in great distress. Chemical castration is the punishment for his sexuality. Its effect on the mind and body of the human subject is in poignant conversation with the societal mind that inflicts this kind of primal punishment.”

16 October 2018

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