Headshot

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024

A Book of the Year for the New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph, GQ and The Times

On Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List 2024

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction Best Debut

Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.

This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we’ve been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon?

Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls’ lives, which intersect for a moment – a universe that shimmers and resonates.

‘Explosive . . . Bullwinkel jumps between past, present and future to bring these powerful, brilliant, messy young women vividly to life.’ Guardian, a summer pick

‘Whether you’re a boxing fan or not, Headshot is a winner.’ Independent

‘An absolute knock-out . . . its visceral, skilful prose grips from first to last . . . Excellent.’ Declan Ryan, Daily Telegraph 5*

‘An ambitious, exciting debut. You emerge from it sweaty, pummelled and ready for your next fight.’ Laura Hackett, The Times

‘A knock-out . . . Headshot feels like the complete deal in a way we rarely see in debut fiction: efficient, forceful, just messy enough to be interesting and leaving space in the ring for the reader.’ John Self, Observer

‘Beauty, brutality and the sheer banality of violence combine . . . If Headshot is about fighting, then it is as much about individuals fighting for their burgeoning selves, for a rightful space in which to exist.’ Benjamin Myers, Guardian

‘Fighting is shown to be an undeniable, animal part of femininity in this knockout debut novel . . . Exhilarating . . . It’s a subversive portrait of a nation and its daughters.’ Spectator

‘Compelling.’ Daily Mail

‘Insightful, bold and accomplished, Headshot is also heartfelt.’ Ian Samson, Times Literary Supplement

‘This novel is about how intoxicating it is “to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent’s eyes.” It is about pride and control and the way a fighter’s “blood and her salty tears and slick sweat make it look like she is leaking pink Kool-Aid from her nostrils.” It’s about the joy of violence, joy in the unambiguous event.’ Dwight Garner, New York Times

‘Headshot is a shock and a fever-dream and a fury of a novel. It’s controlled violence and uncontrolled ambitions, coming-of-age and coming-into-self, motels and warehouses and future visions and weird little raccoon tail hats. It’s everything you want from a novel about a teenage girls’ boxing championship, and a whole lot more. I loved it.’ Jon McGregor

‘A novel that is, miraculously, both brutal and wistful. I love how it celebrates unsung lives lived boldly and bloodily, uncovering something surprising and profound for every punch landed.’ Lisa McInerney

‘Headshot feels perfectly unprecedented. A total killer. I almost can’t believe it exists.’ Amina Cain

‘I loved it.’ Charlotte Mendelson 

‘The pages are alive with hope, despair and violence as she takes us beyond the gloves and headguard, into a series of rich and conflicting internal worlds. By turns a celebration and an interrogation, Headshot is brutal, tender, and completely surprising.’ Rebecca Perry

‘An extraordinary act of literary telepathy. With prose as muscular and gleaming as a body in motion, Bullwinkel drops readers into that roaring, incandescent universe that is young womanhood. This is a book with its own pulse.’ C. Pam Zhang

‘This is an expertly crafted psychological study of girlhood, and of the women who emerge from its stranglehold. Bullwinkel writes with wisdom and care, and her prose has the confident spring of a knockout.’ Madeleine Gray

‘A knockout, a novel as fierce and vibrant as its girl boxers. I’ve never read a book like this, that captures girlhood and life itself in the fleeting moments that make us.’ Rachel Khong

‘Headshot is just that – a shot to the head, a cumulative wallop to the senses. Bullwinkel’s prose jabs, spars, feints, floats, stings, and slowly floods us with the force of the fact: time and will can make the dust of an ordinary life sparkle.’ Namwali Serpell

‘A true portrait of life as a young girl boxer. The accuracy with which Bullwinkel depicts thinking while competing in a boxing match is excellent.’ Ginny Fuchs, American Olympic Boxer, four-time American National Champion

‘Rita Bullwinkel is brilliant on the physical collision, at once strategic and feral, that is a boxing match, and the private hopes and agonies that compel fighters to step through the ropes.’ Laura van den Berg

‘For each young woman, Bullwinkel also conjures a life ahead, and these brilliantly imagined future selves add to the richness of the characterisations. The classic momentum of a sports narrative unfurls in unusually lyric and muscular language: a ferocious novel.’ Starred review, Kirkus

‘The fragile lives of her weekend warriors are faithfully portrayed in prose that is intelligible but never commonplace, virtuosic yet grounded. Bullwinkel’s knockout performance mops the floor with rank pretenders.’ Starred review, Publishers Weekly

‘The novel’s prose as taut as the novel’s structure, with knock-out literary punches throughout. It may be early to call it, but this has to be one of the most dazzling debuts of the year.’ Marie Claire

‘Add Rita Bullwinkel’s novel about the world of competitive female boxing to your 2024 reading list.’ Sunday Times, Style

‘Obsessive perfectionism, pure pleasure — and the narrative collision is thrilling.’ i-D, Books to get excited about in 2024

‘Brilliant . . . Bullwinkel, like the finest of fighters, wields grace and vision, a most powerful hit.’ Samantha Hunt

‘Genius . . . brilliant, perfect . . . as devastating and inventive and philosophical and playful as you could imagine. I dreamed of it for days.’ Deb Olin Unferth

‘As blazing and distinctive a performance as I’ve beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel’s figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters’ bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I’m amazed.’ Jonathan Lethem

‘A luminously unsentimental, tour-de-force exploration of competition and its consequences . . . Headshot is literature at its vital, primal best.’ John Wray