Man-Eating Typewriter: Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023

Product Information

Working at Royal Mail is almost like being paid to be at the amusement arcades, firing parcels into postcoded mailbags, but at its worst it’s like prison labour, tipping mail-sacks on to a belt for seven hours, trance-like. These are initially used to guide the reader through Novak's eccentric use of Polari, but grow into a narrative told alongside Novak's memoirs. Does the novel’s linguistic and structural complexity explain why it’s been so long since your last book? In the lead-up to the announcement of the Goldsmiths Prize 2023, Richard was interviewed in the New Statesman by Ellen Peirson-Hagger, judge and assistant culture editor.

Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.In the lead-up to the White Rabbit event at Verdant Brewing Co’s taproom in Penryn, Cornwall, Richard spoke to Matthew Shaw for Verdant’s Brewing Folk podcast, soundtracked by French yé-yé, My Bloody Valentine and Lush tracks chosen by Richard. Featuring Novak’s favourite slogan - LUBRICATE REALITY WITH DREAMS - in a handwritten font by Milward, the organic cotton T-shirts are available in two colourways: blue denim and white. It’s quite a sing-song, sardonic lingo, and so when Novak’s criticising the world around him - a stifling, conservative world he finds unbearable - that world appears even more absurd than it would if he was slagging it off in standard English. He believes himself to be in love with Eve, who is an attractive and promiscuous hard drinker and drug user. I started writing and sent stuff to Canongate because they’d published Children of Albion Rovers and they sent a really positive rejection quite soon after, saying: “There’s no way you’re 12!

I wasn’t writing to impress people and that’s the same now; I want my books to do well but I don’t want fame. The judges for this year’s prize are Tom Lee, Maddie Mortimer, Helen Oyeyemi and Ellen Peirson-Hagger. My novels had been getting more surreal and I wanted to do something different – almost to be more experimental by doing something less dreamlike. It is narrated in the first person by several characters (including a butterfly), but mainly by Adam and Eve, two school students.

I’d been juggling an idea about a cult leader with another about a strange dystopia with an invented slang. The Polari word for face is eke – short for ecaf, or face backwards – but there’s no word for head or brain. Novak’s Polari is rooted in Polari as it was spoken in the 60s but it’s by no means a watertight time capsule. It was a brilliant mix of people and a time of real togetherness but I hid my writing like a secret vice.