2025 New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture: Why The Novel Matters? Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Geoff delivers the 2025 New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture, asking whether the novel is still ‘the one bright book of life’.

For his talk Dyer goes back to the title source, to the claims made by D. H. Lawrence exactly one hundred years ago, in his eponymous essay, and look at how the novel – and indeed the reputation of Lawrence himself – has fared in the century-long wake of his pronouncements.

Might other forms matter as much as the novel today? Does it even matter whether the novel matters? Why do some novels matter more than others? What does the decision-making process tell us about the status and health of the novel? The Goldsmiths Prize 2025 shortlist is announced at the end of the event.

Geoff Dyer’s many books, on a bewildering variety of subjects and in constantly mutating forms, constitute what the New York Review of Books has called ‘one of the strangest bodies of work in contemporary letters.’ These books have been translated into 24 languages. Homework, a memoir, is published in May.

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For a discount on tickets use this code: NOVEL5OFF

Presented in association with the Goldsmiths Prize and The New Statesman.