The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been announced by this year’s judging panel, at an event held at Somerset House’s Portico Rooms in London and livestreamed to readers around the world.
Featuring the largest number of shortlisted women in the Booker Prize’s 55 year history, the list introduces readers to the best sustained works of fiction written in English. These stories will transport readers around the world and beyond the earth’s atmosphere: from the International Space Station to a cave network beneath the French countryside, and almost everywhere in between.
The shortlist
- James by Percival Everett
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
- Held by Anne Michaels
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
- Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The judges
The shortlisted six novels were chosen from 13 longlisted titles – a “booker dozen” – by the 2024 panel of judges. 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.
Edmund de Waal, Booker Prize 2024 Chair of judges, says:
I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us. We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.
If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships. They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them, novels that inspired us to write, to score music, and even – in my case – to go back to my wheel and make pots.
The Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place on the evening of Tuesday, 12 November 2024 at Old Billingsgate in London and will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row at 9.30pm. 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.
For more information, visit the Booker Prizes website.
Get involved
If you work in a library or workplace and would like to promote the shortlist, you can download a free digital pack from our shop.
What do you think of the 2024 shortlisted titles? Which have you read and what will be added to your TBR pile? Add your comments below, or click any title above to leave a review.
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