The Encore Award

The £10,000 Encore Award for the best second novel - now awarded biennially - was first awarded in 1990.

The Encore Award 2011

The Encore Award 2011 for the best second novel of 2009 and 2010 has been awarded to Adam Foulds for The Quickening Maze. The £10,000 prize was presented by Ali Smith, winner of the award in 2002 with her novel Hotel World, at a reception at Dartmouth House in London W1 on 10th May 2011.
Historically accurate and intensely imagined, The Quickening Maze (Cape) recreates the poet John Clare’s first incarceration in High Beach Private Asylum in Epping Forest, where the brother of another poet, Alfred Tennyson, is a voluntary patient.
Adam Foulds was born in 1974, took a Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and now lives in South London. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times was published in 2007 and received a Betty Trask award, and his book length narrative poem, The Broken Word, published in the following year, was a Costa Book Award winner. The Quickening Maze was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009.

The Judges

The judges for the 2011 award, Alex Clark, Lindsay Duguid and Peter Parker, described The Quickening Maze as ‘a confident, beautifully written historical novel, seamed with poetry and intense descriptions of the natural world, which unobtrusively deploys its documentary underpinnings. Structured like a collage in which vividly evoked episodes fit together thematically, it also has a satisfying overarching narrative in which individual lives take their separate courses'.

The 2011 shortlist

Charles Chadwick for A Chance Acquaintance (Short Books) - ‘a book about surfaces and appearances and what lies beneath: funny, tough and rigorously unsentimental’.
Adam Foulds for The Quickening Maze - ‘a confident, beautifully written historical novel, seamed with poetry and intense descriptions of the natural world'.
Georgina Harding for The Spy Game (Bloomsbury) - ‘a beautifully written book about origins, intity and secrecy’.
Christopher Nicholson for The Elephant Keeper (Fourth Estate) - ‘an engagingly narrated story of a stable-boy and an elephant, bringing the 18th century, in all its splendour and cruelty, into vivid focus’.
Monique Roffey for The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster) -
‘a story of political and personal disillusionment, this engrossing novel seamlessly integrates a fictional couple into real historical events’.
Adam Thirlwell for The Escape (Cape) - ‘an absurdist Jewish comedy which fizzes with comic and linguistic energy’.

The Encore Award 2013

• The deadline for entry to the 2013 Award is 30th November 2012. Download an entry form and guidelines here.

Past winners

To find out about past winners of this Award, see www.encoreaward.com