Winner: Observer/Anthony Burgess prize 2024: Oscar Jelley

The winning entry for this year’s competition to discover outstanding new critical writing on the arts dissects the surrealist fantasy and political warning of the German-British writer’s latest novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

Read this year’s two Observer/Burgess prize runner-up entries

Oscar Jelley is a master’s student at the University of Oxford. He has written for student papers such as Cherwell, the Oxford Blue and the Oxford Review of Books, and has a Substack, Adventures Close to Home.

“Life should be full of strangeness/ like a rich painting,” declares the protagonist of the Fall’s How I Wrote Elastic Man, a song about a writer whose success ruins his life. It could just as well be the credo of Isabel Waidner, whose latest book, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, concerns a novelist named Corey Fah whose world is upended after they win an “award for the fictionalisation of social evils”. When Fah goes to collect the trophy, it flies away, leaving them with nothing but the strange half-deer, half-spider hybrid that has inexplicably appeared beside them. They take him home and call him “Bambi Pavok”. The subsequent narrative eschews realism in favour of the rich strangeness of a chatshow about wormholes presented by a man in boxing shorts, a retelling of Bambi in terms of working-class ressentiment, and hints of a world in which most things are broken and reality is taking on bizarre new shapes.