'Interweaving the intimate and political in radically original ways’, de boeken die die de shortlist voor de International Booker Prize 2024 vormen zijn bekend. Samen representeren ze zes landen, drie continenten, en een rijkdom aan stemmen. De titels 'werpen een forensisch oog op verdeelde families en verdeelde samenlevingen; ze herzien de geschiedenis, nabij en ver, in een poging om het heden beter te begrijpen' zegt Fiammetta Rocco, voorzitter van de International Booker Prize. Deze zes titels vormen de shortlist:

• 'Not a river' - Selva Almada, vertaald door Annie McDermott
• Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise.The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided? Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada’s latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.This masterful novel reveals once again Selva Almada's unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, allowing its characters to shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour. 

• 'Kairos' - Jenny Erpenbeck, vertaald door Michael Hofmann
• Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of the two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears

• 'The Details' - Ia Genberg, vertaald door Kira Josefsson
• A woman lies bedridden from a high fever.Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the womans own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget. There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint.There is Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a painful secret. The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories.The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.

• 'Mater 2-10' - Hwang Sok-yong, vertaald door Sora Kim-Russell en Youngjae Josephine Bae
• An epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, MATER 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a powerful account that captures a nation's longing for a rail line to reconnect North and South, a magical-realist novel that depicts reflect the lives of modern industrial workers, and a culmination of Hwang's career - a masterpiece thirty years in the making. A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the grief of a divided nation and bringing to life the cultural identity and trials and tribulations of the Korean people.

• 'What I'd Rather Not Think About' - Jente Posthuma, vertaald door Sarah Timmer Harvey
• What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.

• 'Crooked Plow' - Itamar Vieira Junior, vertaald  door Johnny Lorenz
• Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.Heralded as a new masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath, and political struggle.

De zes titels werden dit jaar gekozen door de jury bestaande uit Eleanor Wachtel, Natalie Diaz, Romesh Gunesekera, William Kentridge en Aaron Robertson. 
Het slotfeest van The International Booker Prize 2024 vindt plaats op dinsdag 21 mei in Londen waar de winnaar bekend wordt gemaakt.