Manorbier author Paul Griffiths (pictured) has been shortlisted for the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize 2020 with his latest release ‘Mr. Beethoven’.

Mr. Beethoven is a novel about how a writer might go about interpreting the life of one of the most well-known composers who ever lived.

Author Paul’s historiography weaves through the text in counterpoint, revealing the fragility of the traces he uses to give Mr. Beethoven seven more years.

In 1823 Beethoven received a commission to write a biblical oratorio in the United States. How could this have worked?

As Beethoven wrestles with his muse, and his librettist Rev. Ballou, he comes to rely on two women. Thankful, who conducts his conversations using Martha’s Vineyard sign language, and a kindred spirit: the widow Mrs. Hill. Meanwhile all Boston waits in anxious expectation of a first performance the composer, and the world, will never hear.

Variously admonishing the amateur music society and laughing in the company of his hosts’ children, the immortal composer is brought back to the fullness of life.

Paul is an internationally respected authority on classical music, whose books have been translated into twelve languages.

He has worked as a music critic on major publications in London (The Times) and New York (The New York Times, The New Yorker). He received an OBE for services to music literature and composition, and has been honoured also in France (Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) and the United States (Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences).

His first novel, ‘Myself and Marco Polo’ (Chatto & Windus), won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1990, and extracts from his third, ‘let me tell you’ (Reality Street), were made into a song cycle by Hans Abrahamsen in 2013 for Barbara Hannigan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the College and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.

The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterizes the genre at its best.

The winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize will be announced on November 11.