The Irish authors Eimear McBride and Mike McCormack and the Irish-Canadian writer Anakana Schofield have been short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize for fiction. The prize, which awards "boldly original fiction", is worth £10,000 sterling.

McBride, who won the Goldsmiths Prize for her debut, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, is nominated for her follow-up, The Lesser Bohemians. McCormack is short-listed for Solar Bones and Schofield for her third book, Martin John.

The Lesser Bohemians took McBride eight years to write and explores the relationship between an 18-year-old Irish drama student and the older actor she meets in mid-1990s North London. Set in a series of bedsits and squats, the tale is described as "a story about love and innocence, joy and discovery". 

Launched in Dublin last May by Irish imprint Tramp Press, McCormack's highly-inventive Solar Bones conjures up the return of the dead on All Souls' Day.

Schofield's Martin John takes readers into the mind of an Irish sex offender living in London. It was described by The New Yorker as a "frenetic, risk-taking novel", while The Guardian called Schofield's work "funny, distressing and complicated". 

The winner of the Goldsmiths Prize will be announced at a ceremony in London on November 9. Transit by Rachel Cusk, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika and Hot Milk by Deborah Levy complete this year's shortlist.

It is with a sense of vindication that both McCormack and Tramp Press will greet news of the short-listing, given that Solar Bones failed to be long-listed for the Man Booker prize - as an independent Irish publisher, Tramp Press was not eligible. This year marks the first time a title from an Irish publisher has been short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize.

"I'm delighted to have been short-listed for a prize which makes a point of honouring experimental fiction," McCormack declared.

Lisa Coen, who is co-publisher of Tramp Press, declared that she was "over the moon". "This short-listing is a fantastic endorsement of Mike's brave and original novel," she said.

Coen added that the novel could not have happened without the Arts Council grant which funded publication. Irish author Kevin Barry is another previous Goldsmiths winner for Beatlebone in 2015.

On publication, Solar Bones was welcomed by critics and fellow authors alike, including Kevin Barry. McCormack's surreal vision and fecund imagination have been widely praised in a novel that tells the story of Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer who returns to his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.

Tramp Press describes the book as "a beautiful and haunting elegy, (this) story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day".

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

The annual prize of £10,000 (€11,600) is awarded to a book that is deemed "genuinely novel" and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.