Ian Penman Bags The 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize

If you enjoy reading poetry and prose that really gets under the skin of a place, add this shortlist to your TBR. The Royal Society of Literature (RSL)’s annual Ondaatje Prize is back, and one talented writer has bagged the top prize: Ian Penman for his novel Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Ian said on collecting his prize from Jans Ondaatje Rolls, overseeing the ceremony on behalf of her father Christopher. ‘I’d like to thank Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who I think is astonishing and created a culture very much not like our own. Without him there wouldn’t be this book, and I dedicate this award to him. Thank you so much.’

Chair of judges Xiaolu Guo praised Penman’s ingenuity and originality: ‘This is the only book I have read twice this year. Truly it is thousands of mirrors in terms of the thoughts, images and references running through this reflective and wonderfully interior work. The world of European cinema, especially Fassbinder’s film seen through Ian Penman’s eyes, has transported me to a tantalizing place called post-war Europe. The book brings me back to my youth and my film school years in the east and west, and it reminds me of how powerful images have shaped our very understanding of love and life.’

Congratulations, Ian!

RSL Ondaatje Prize 2024

‘Place has always been important to me as a writer, and I’ve loved the brilliant variety of its imaginative reflections in the longlist,’ says Francis Spufford, one of the judges of the prize, alongside Jan Carson and Xiaolu Guo.

‘Judging the RSL Ondaatje Prize has been a fantastic opportunity to discover some wonderful writers I’d never previously encountered,’ adds Carson. I’ve spent my winter in glorious hibernation, reading an incredible range of thought-provoking, wise and timely books. I honestly couldn’t think of a better way to spend my time.’

‘It has been a rich and intense experience reading all the wonderful nominations for this year,’ adds fellow judge Guo. ‘It is hard to make a longlist, even harder a shortlist. All I can say is that my mind has been nourished by my fellow writers, by the familiar and unfamiliar voices, those from near and far, which have expanded my imagination’s horizon.’

If you’d like to explore the shortlist, you can see it below.

The Shortlist

Spanning fiction, non-fiction and poetry, the six books on the shortlist for the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize are:

• Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong
• Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
• A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
• Cuddy by Benjamin Myers
• No Man’s Land by David Nash
• Fassbinder, Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman – WINNER

Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong

Xiaolu Guo: ‘A truly impressive debut from a storyteller who knows how to control the rhythm and poetry of her narrative. I was immersed in that unique Irish landscape, the mystery of ‘the man,’ and the collective experience of the place.’

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Jan Carson: ‘I was blown away by the way Hammad manages to weave so many ideas, perspectives and conceits into Enter Ghost without once compromising the integrity of her storytelling. This is a novel which has much to say about identity, crisis, belonging and so many other issues pertinent to the world right now and yet, it’s also a cracking story; heartfelt, urgent and beautifully told.’

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud

Francis Spufford: ‘The English fens, the flatlands of Pakistan, the Cold-War-marked levels of Orford Ness: wide places, places apparently without concealment or surprises, explored as balm for the troubled mind in a remarkable memoir of trauma and its aftermath.’

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers

Xiaolu Guo: ‘What an amazing novel about our relationship to history and place! The narrative weaves together organically diverse events and different time /periods, and the prose is so poetic that it makes you believe that fiction is perhaps the most effective way to narrate history.’

No Man’s Land by David Nash

Jan Carson: ‘This poetry collection caught me by surprise. I found so much to relish in Nash’s depiction of the rural landscape and the way he both interrogates and celebrates ideas of belonging. There’s an earthiness to these poems which I found both deeply familiar and comforting but also wry, clever and a little bit frisky. No Man’s Land is incredibly assured for a debut collection.’

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman

Francis Spufford: ‘An evocation of, a meditation on, the sumptuously harsh and glamorously ugly work of the great 1970s German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which expands to become a little modernist triumph in itself, reflecting back from its numbered paragraphs what Europe once meant to an English boy smoking in a midnight screening at the Scala cinema: liberation, excitement, and a palette of anti-parochial ideas to understand the world with.’