Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions are pleased to announce that Giada Scodellaro has won the 2024 Novel Prize for her debut novel Ruins, Child.
The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers $10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in North America by New York-based New Directions, in the UK and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo. Selected from 1,100 submissions, Giada Scodellaro’s novel will be published simultaneously by all three publishers in early 2026.
Set in what may be the future, and centred on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. Giada Scodellaro’s novel is like a precious old mirror: dropped, looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard. It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: Scodellaro’s female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, social commentary, folklore, choreography and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.
Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. She is a queer writer and artist who holds an MFA in Fiction from the New School. Giada’s writings have appeared in the New Yorker, BOMB and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency fellow. Her debut collection, Some of Them Will Carry Me, was named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022.
The Novel Prize rewards novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, the inaugural winner in 2020, was selected from close to 1,500 submissions worldwide, and was published in March 2022. Cold Enough for Snow has since been sold into over twenty territories, and was the recipient of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2023, among other prizes. In its second award, the Novel Prize was shared by Jonathan Buckley’s Tell and Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, which went on to win the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, and will appear soon in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Turkish.
Giada Scodellaro, on being told of winning the prize, replied: ‘I am so humbled, so thrilled, so in awe of this outcome. What a dream it is for this work to exist outside of myself. A collaboration with the extraordinary New Directions, Fitzcarraldo, and Giramondo affords Ruins, Child an urgent and expansive opportunity—a life.’
For any PR enquiries, please contact Clare Bogen at [email protected].
