The Royal Society of Literature Reveals Winner of the 2023 Encore Award for Emergency

The Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the voice for the value of literature in the UK, has announced Daisy Hildyard as the winner of the 2023 Encore Award for Emergency (Fitzcarraldo Editions). A sustained mediation on the potential of our human interconnections with all that surrounds us, Emergency is as much a lyrical celebration of life as it is a disquietude and call to action. An enthralling experience of being truly in the world. The annual Encore Award of £10,000 celebrates outstanding achievements in second novels. Shortlisted writers all receive a £500 prize.

This year the prize-winner was announced at a live event. Daisy Hildyard was unable to attend but was informed and accepted the award saying: 

‘An award for a second attempt is a kind-hearted award and I am happy and grateful to have been a part of it this year. The other authors on the shortlist are all writers whose work I respect, and I like that the award makes us into a cohort: we’ve written our different books about different things, but we’re together on our second novels at the same moment (even though I reckon I’m the oldest, which means they’re actually one step ahead of me). When we are very, very old, on our seventy-fifth novels, I hope we’ll still be seeing and reading each other. 

I’m grateful to my agent David Godwin and to my publishers Fitzcarraldo, who made this book – I just wrote a Word doc – and they’ve cared for it so thoughtfully and generously, before and since its release. 

The prize money will give me time at my desk, it makes a big and real difference. Speaking personally, it meant a lot to me that the judges described Emergency as a celebration of life, an experience of being in the thick of life – thank you for reading the novel and thinking about it like this. And it’s good to think of people feeling that, inside or outside the book.’

This year’s judges, Maura Dooley, Daljit Nagra and Nikesh Shukla commented:

‘Emergency is a work of great style and substance; contemplative, clever and seductive. Lyrically unfolding its story slowly and delicately through the compelling voice of a narrator brought to a standstill in lockdown, this work reflects on rural life at a point of great change. In contemplating childhood, in her evocation of her schooldays, in the natural world seen through the eyes of a child, Hildyard summons a world just pre-internet, a place in which the edgelands of a rural community struggle as employment slips away. 

In her finely-observed and precise descriptions of the environment Hildyard elides the easy distinctions between the man-made and the natural world, asking the reader to look harder. The reader is invited to consider what the destruction of this interrelated world might mean for us all. This is a powerful pastoral novel written with a watchful, unsparing eye, both praising and exposing the beauty, the ugliness, and the essential interconnectedness of life.’

Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay ‘The Second Body’, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published in 2017, and her second novel Emergency was published in 2022, both by Fitzcarraldo Editions. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

The Encore Award was first presented in 1990 to celebrate the achievement of outstanding second novels. The Award fills a niche in the catalogue of literary prizes. The RSL has administered the award since 2016.

The Encore Award is one of 10 annual awards and prizes presented by the RSL, which bring the widest possible community of writers and readers together in celebration of the breadth of literature today. From debut works and unpublished short stories, through to the notoriously challenging second novel and outstanding contributions to literature, the RSL’s awards and prizes celebrate the value of writing in all its forms, whilst supporting emerging and established writers at some of the most challenging moments of their careers. The RSL’s other annual awards and prizes are: RSL International Writers awards, Companions of Literature, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the RSL Christopher Bland Prize, the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards for Non-Fiction, the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, the RSL Literature Matters Awards, the Sky Arts RSL Writers Awards and the Benson Medal.

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