Meet the judges for the Booker Prize 2024
The panel for next year's Booker Prize, awarded annually for the best work of long-form fiction, has now been announced
Artist and author Edmund de Waal chairs the 2024 judging panel and 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. They will be looking for the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.  Â
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced in July 2024, with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced at a ceremony in November.
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the Booker Prize 2024 judges, comments:  Â
‘Fiction expands us. Novels bring proximity to worlds and lives and voices that we may not have been aware of, taking us from what we know into what we can only imagine. They renew language, change the shape of storytelling and above everything else bring deep and enduring pleasure. The great ambition of the Booker Prize is to explore contemporary fiction without preconceptions, and I am so privileged to be sharing my year of reading with such a gloriously distinguished and vigorous group of fellow explorers. I am looking forward to being part of the best book club ever.’
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds: Â
‘This year’s judges are perceptive readers, creative thinkers, seasoned collaborators. All of them are writers, but between them they also have backgrounds in science, law, music and art. Their lived experience spans the globe. Their Chair, Edmund De Waal, is deeply respected the world over for his ability to put people, books and works of art in conversation with one another.  Â
‘If the purpose of literature is, in part, to bridge a gap – to allow us to see the world from another point of view and to draw people together – then the 2024 panel couldn’t be better equipped to recommend works to readers that will get them thinking and talking. I’m hugely looking forward to hearing this group’s discussions as they discover great writing over the coming year.’ Â
About the judges
Edmund de Waal (Chair) is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels and for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which won the 2010 Costa Book Award for Biography and the 2011 Ondaatje Prize. It has been translated into over 30 languages and in 2016 was awarded Book of the Decade by the Independent Booksellers Association. De Waal was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction in 2015, the year he published The White Road. In 2021, when he published Letters to Camondo, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. His art publications include texts by a number of Booker Prize authors, including the late A.S. Byatt, Colm ToÃbÃn, Peter Carey and Elif Shafak. 
De Waal’s interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum and the V&A Museum in London; Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The Frick Collection, New York and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Â
Sara Collins is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019, became a Times bestseller, was translated into more than 15 languages and was broadcast as a four-part television drama on ITV in December 2022.   Sara studied law at the London School of Economics before qualifying as a barrister in 1994. She worked as a lawyer for 17 years before obtaining a Master's degree in creative writing with distinction from Cambridge University in 2016, where she was the recipient of the Michael Holroyd Prize.  Â
Sara is also a literary critic, screenwriter and broadcaster. She has been a frequent contributor and guest host on BBC Radio 4 and is a co-host of the Graham Norton Book Club Podcast on Audible. Â
Justine Jordan has been Fiction Editor at the Guardian for two decades. She has commissioned reviews and interviewed writers including Raymond Briggs, Susanna Clarke, Jon McGregor, Sebastian Barry and China Mieville.  Â
She was born in London and grew up in Bristol. She studied English at Cambridge and Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin. She won the Vogue writing competition and then joined the Guardian website in its early days as night editor, going on to set up the books website.  Â
Her criticism has featured in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the London Review of Books. She is a member of the Writers’ Prize academy, and her previous judging experience includes the Guardian First Book Prize, the 4thWrite Short Story Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Â
Yiyun Li is the author of 11 books, including Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End. Her novels and short stories have been translated into more than 20 languages. Li’s honours and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and others.  Â
Trained as a scientist, she is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a 2023 International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Harper's, among other publications. She is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing programme at the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Nitin Sawhney is a world-class producer, songwriter, touring artist, club DJ, multi-instrumentalist and composer for theatre, dance, videogames and orchestras. He has recorded multiple albums and over 70 film and TV scores, which include adaptations of the 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and The Namesake by Booker-shortlisted novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Human Planet, What’s Love Got To Do With It and a current project for Disney.    Â
The recipient of the Ivor Novello 2017 Lifetime Achievement award, he has collaborated with other world-class artists of all kinds. He has had his own BBC Radio 2 series and appeared on Desert Island Discs. He holds eight honorary doctorates from UK universities and sits on the boards of multiple charities, including Complicité. For the last four years he has been the Chair of the PRS Foundation, the UK’s funding body for new music and talent development, as well as being a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts and the Grammy Awards.  A regular cultural and political commentator, he has written articles for all the major UK broadsheets and is due to release an anthology of his written work next year. His latest album, ‘IDENTITY’, for Warner Music, was released in October 2023. He was made CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours.  Â