Cuddy: Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize

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Cuddy, Myers’s eighth novel, is a polyphonic hymn to a very specific landscape and its people. At the same time, it deepens his standing as an arresting chronicler of a broader, more mysterious seam of ancient folklore that unites the history of these isles as it’s rarely taught. Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Cuddy is an extraordinary book. Is it my favourite by Myers? No. But there's still a lot to love here. The book is told in single stories that make a whole - each section has a different format and style, and different characters. This type of novel is very hard to get right and I don't often love them (it's why I've never got on with the David Mitchell books I've tried for example!). It's going to be hard to find a reader who loves every section equally and there will inevitably be highs and lows. Book II tells of masons repairing the cathedral stonework in 1346 and makes the saint an actor in condemning an abusive husband. The third book offers a pastiche of an M. R. James ghost story, set in 1827, when a sceptical professor finds his confidence in science challenged at the opening of the saint’s tomb. And, in the final part, a young labourer, Michael Cuthbert, has his own encounter with the numinous when unexpectedly given work in the cathedral while his mother lies dying at home.

I found the poetry of Thomas Hardy to be dismal and the prose of DH Lawrence to be overwrought – all those exclamation marks. Expressing this was probably the reason I failed A-level English. But I now recognise both as visionaries who saw far beyond the England they occupied. I particularly admire Lawrence’s novellas, The Fox and The Virgin and the Gypsy. The book itself is separated into distinct times during which many people take centre stage. I love the differences in language and behaviour that he's captured, along with the changes in the story of how Cuthbert ended up at Durham and why the cathedral was built there. The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumple to sand.’York St John University announces 2019 honorary graduates". York St John University. 11 October 2019. And the way that certain characters (eg an owl-eyed boy) and certain motifs (eg wild garlic) echo through the ages makes the sum greater than its sometimes flawed parts. Alongside Oyeyemi and Lee on the judging panel were author Maddie Mortimer and New Statesman assistant culture editor Ellen Peirson-Hagger. Myers, Benjamin (2005). Green Day: American idiots & the new punk explosion. Church Stretton: Independent Music Press. ISBN 0-9539942-9-5. OCLC 64553821.

Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Several more sections follow in which we follow a young girl with her visions of a cathedral and her visitations from Cuthbert (AD995); we live in the shadow of that cathedral (Durham cathedral as we know it) with a woman (AD1346) whose husband is a famous archer but is also abusive and she falls for another, more gentle, man; we read the journal of an Oxford antiquarian (AD1827) as he travels to the north of England (which he despises) to witness the disinterment of a body in the cathedral; and we follow Michael Cuthbert in AD2019 as he cares for his mother and scratches a living as a labourer, eventually finding more stable work at the cathedral. Myers, Benjamin (2002). American heretics: rebel voices in music. Hove: Codex. ISBN 1-899598-23-5. OCLC 50175926. Book two, The Mason’s Mark, carries us forward to 1346. Fletcher Bullard – champion archer, domestic abuser – is off fighting the Scots. When his wife, Eda, meets Francis Rolfe, one of a team of masons engaged in repairing and enhancing Durham Cathedral’s decorative stonework, what occurs will live on in the stone. Myers grew up in Belmont, County Durham, [2] and was a pupil at the estate's local comprehensive school where he become interested in reading and skateboarding. [3]

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Cuddy is a book told through four connected novels, plus an interlude, at different key moments throughout the history of Durham Cathedral and its founding as a home for the relics of St Cuthbert. (Although the choice of 1827 for one part also allows an implicit dig at Liz Truss!)

Myers reworks these stories to give us a masterpiece deserving of a place on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. The finely woven stories even use lines from the referenced works of multiple historians; an inventive way to set some historical narrative alongside the fiction.

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As the book moves from 687 to 2019 in centuries-long leaps, there are less obvious themes which run throughout. Where does one find inspiration, and why are some sources more powerful than others? Is the distance between the sacred and the profane really so great? When is historical inquiry illuminating, and are there times one should simply "let his story lie" undisturbed? Myers is particularly fascinated by the journey of self-discovery that is the birthright of each person. And his personal love for the natural world allows for some truly vivid scene-setting. Duffy, Kevin (29 December 2016). "The Society of Authors' Roger Deakin Award 2016". Bluemoose Books. Archived from the original on 16 January 2021. Another high point for me was the use early on of multiple excerpts from other writers writing about St Cuthbert ,these feel like a cacophony of voices like the chatter of the Ancestors ,almost another character themselves