WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2021

Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling – with the help of their three best friends – must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.

Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka’s The Trial written for the era of gaslighting – a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies.

Following the Goldsmiths Prize–nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner’s latest novel proposes community, inventiveness and the stubborn refusal to lie low as antidotes against marginalisation and towards better futures.

A sublime, mesmerising feat blending the surreal and political. Waidner is a ferocious, uniquely gifted talent and the world feels all the better for it.’ — Irenosen Okojie

Isabel Waidner (born 14 February 1974) is a German-British writer and cultural theorist based in London, England. They have written four novels: Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023, Hamish Hamilton), Sterling Karat Gold (2021, Peninsula Press), We are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019, Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and Gaudy Bauble (2017, Dostoyevsky Wannabe). We are Made of Diamond Stuff was nominated for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and Sterling Karat Gold won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. They are the editor of the anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018, Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and have written for numerous publications including Granta, Frieze and the Cambridge Literary Review.

Peninsula Press, 2021, 192 pages.