The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been announced, featuring five women and authors from five countries.
The 2024 shortlist for the Booker Prize – the world’s most influential prize for a single work of fiction – was announced on 16 September 2024. The shortlist includes the largest number of women in the Booker’s 55-year history, with five women and one man represented. Authors from five countries appear on the list, including the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted, the first Australian in 10 years, as well as British, Canadian and American authors. Two of the authors have been shortlisted previously.
The six books were selected by the 2024 judging panel from 156 works published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024, and submitted to the prize by publishers. The panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
The list features stories which transport readers around the world and beyond Earth’s atmosphere: from the battlefields of the First World War to a spiritual retreat in rural Australia; from America’s Deep South in the 19th century to a remote Dutch house in the 1960s; from the International Space Station to a cave network beneath the French countryside. Among other things, the shortlisted books explore the gravitational pull of home and family; the contested nature of truth and history; and the extent to which we reveal our real selves to others.
The Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place on the evening of Tuesday, November 12 2024 at Old Billingsgate in London and will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. The ceremony will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube and Instagram channels. The winner will receive £50,000, a trophy named Iris (after winner Iris Murdoch), and can expect their career to be transformed. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book.
The Shortlist:
- Held - Anne Michaels
- Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner
- Orbital - Samantha Harvey
- James - Percival Everett
- The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden
- Stone Yard Devotional - Charlotte Wood
