As the 2018 shortlist is announced, the chair of this year’s judges explains how they hope to reward more than simple innovation

There’s a passage in Proust that offered useful guidance during meetings to judge this year’s Goldsmiths prize, about “artificial novelty” in a work of art being less effective than a repetition designed to reveal a new truth. (I imagine he’s implicitly defending his own method as a novelist.) What we were looking for – in a prize designed to reward the “genuinely novel” – wasn’t innovation as such, but writers able to take fresh possession of the form’s resources. Books that had strong advocates among the judges but couldn’t quite displace the six on our list have earned thanks for the pleasure they gave us – Jonathan Buckley’s The Great Concert of the Night, Jeremy Gavron’s Felix Culpa, Danny Denton’s The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow, Nick Harkaway’s mighty fantasy Gnomon.

There have been novels in verse before, but the one we selected, Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, does a remarkable job of harnessing the dynamics of prose fiction and has a superb sense of time and place. The main character, a traumatised veteran of the second world war, sees the world collapsing around him a second time in the corporate destruction of Los Angeles as a liveable city. Cinephiles will particularly respond to the element of film noir, not a matter of vague atmosphere but specified shots, angles and film shoots.