The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been announced
Revealing 'the fault lines of our times', the list features the largest number of women in the Booker’s 55-year history and authors from five countries
The shortlist for this year’s Booker Prize – the world’s most influential prize for a single work of fiction – has been announced.
The six books – which Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges, said demonstrate ‘storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity’ – are as follows:
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 shortlist was 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 made up of artist and author Edmund de Waal, 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, Chair of the 2024 judges, says:
‘“I love the fact that a book can be like a living thing,” said one of the judges as we were choosing the shortlist for the Booker Prize. 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.
‘My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They have been carried everywhere – surely the necessary measure of a seriously good novel. Our final meeting to choose this shortlist together was punctuated by delight at them. 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 announcement of the winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will take place at a ceremony and dinner held at Old Billingsgate in London on Tuesday, 12 November. The winning author will receive £50,000. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.
But before then, if you’d like to join the conversation about this year’s Booker Prize, sign up to the Booker Prize Book Club on Facebook, or join our self-guided Reading Challenge, which encourages readers around the world to explore the 2024 long- and shortlists, share their thoughts, and connect with fellow Booker Prize fans.
Whether you want to read just one book, the shortlist or the entire longlist, we’d love you to take part. You can download our reading charts to track and share your progress, and explore the books in detail with our extracts, and interviews with each of the authors.
If you’d like to explore the shortlisted books more deeply, you can do so with our comprehensive reading guides, featuring discussion points and suggestions for further reading.
What do you think of the shortlist? Which books have you read, and which are still on your TBR pile? Let us know in the comments…
Having read “James”, I thought it would be shortlisted. If you liked “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” you’ll love “James”. I am a slow reader, so will turn next to “Orbital” and “The Stone Yard Devotional”, the summaries of which appealed to me and led me to believe that they might be shortlisted.
For sheer originality of perspective, in every sense of the term, and the blending of lyricism with speculation on the nature of connections between humans across space and time, Orbital gets my vote! This is an extraordinary contribution to how the novel as a genre handles narrative.
James is no doubt an interesting novel, but Jean Rhys's revisioning of Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea set this trend decades ago.