Cuddy: Winner of the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize

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Allan, Nina (9 March 2023). "Cuddy by Benjamin Myers review – a visionary history". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 24 March 2023. Then we skip forwards in three-hundred-year bounds, to the time the masons are constructing the final great gothic cathedral, then to a short play, with the cathedral itself as narrator. As the Civil War rages, the great building has become a prison for captured Scottish soldiers. It is not until 2013, when a new café is being constructed, that their mass grave will be discovered. The monastery on Lindisfarne in the 8th century would have been the height of modernity, in terms of how the monks lived, the comforts they were afforded, the theological and moral discussions that would have had. We’re probably only somewhere between fifty and a hundred generations away from that time, and Durham Cathedral is living proof that we were not living like primitives one thousand years ago: we had vision. We understood mathematics, engineering, and were bold thinkers. It wasn’t all scrofula, trebuchets and turnips for breakfast.

Myers, Benjamin (2005). Green Day: American idiots & the new punk explosion. Church Stretton: Independent Music Press. ISBN 0-9539942-9-5. OCLC 64553821. All in all a fabulous book one I would hope would appear on prize lists such as the Booker prize .The book defiantly classes as a literary novel Portico Prize For Literature. Gordon Burn Prize. Roger Deakin Award. Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Goldsmiths Prize. And the novel itself reflects this spinning, tumbling form. It too is fragmentary, leaping across chasms of time and space. A chorus of testimonies is supplied, to fill in the gaps and silences of official histories: the “rag tag menagerie of wandering souls” calling from 10th-century Lincolnshire as they carry Cuddy’s remains across northern England; tales of violence in a 14th-century stonemason’s family as the saint’s shrine assumes a new shape nearby; the stones of Durham Cathedral witnessing Cromwellian desecration as a sacred space becomes a violent prison.The triumphant new novel from Myers was announced as the winner of the Goldsmiths Prizein association with the New Statesman, at a ceremony in London on Wednesday 8 November 2023. 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. If all of this sounds too heady or terribly uninteresting, there is good news: The five narratives which contribute to the book's overarching story are excellent. The writing is extremely fine. There is plenty of wit, intrigue, conflict, atmosphere, character development, and good old storytelling to make this a worthwhile read. I am very glad this one found its way into my hands. In this unique new novel by Benjamin Myers, the story of Cuddy is retold and reworked to take place over multiple centuries after the saint’s death in 687AD. In fact, most of Cuthbert’s story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety. While his actual life is mostly myth and legend, his posthumous wanderings are points of fact and history.

Cuddy is the ninth novel from Benjamin Myers, who was born in Durham and now lives in West Yorkshire. Its central character is St Cuthbert, the unofficial patron saint of the north of England. St Cuthbert was born in Northumbria, became a monk, rose to become abbot of Lindisfarne, and then lived for many years as a hermit. The stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumble to sand. In this first story we meet the young cook who is part of the haliwerfolk, feeding the monks with whatever can be found and also tending to their ailments – their aches and pains and even their tooth aches. This is a poem that she utters and which I though is excellent.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

I want to ask you what’s next but I also don’t want to, as with Ben Myers the surprise is part of the joy of reading. So, if not what’s next, perhaps what’s the book you’d write if there were no limits? The one that makes you think, “Could I?”. Benjamin Myers' "Offene See" ist das Lieblingsbuch der Unabhängigen 2020". Buch Markt. 7 November 2020.