The Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist Announced

And then there were six. The Booker Prize 2024 has announced its shortlist, 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.

For the first time in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history, the shortlist includes five women - and just one man. Here is the lucky list:

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

Three of this year’s shortlisted authors have been nominated for the prize before, and two of them know how it feels to be shortlisted: Pulitzer Prize-nominated Percival Everett was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 for The Trees. Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018 for The Mars Room. Samantha Harvey was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness. The shortlist features just one debut novel: The Safekeep. Tel Aviv-born Yael van der Wouden is the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

When it comes to setting, the six novels on this year’s shortlist are spread far and wide, from 220 miles above the earth to a cave network beneath the French countryside, 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 early 1960s. And all six novels express that essential human need to belong - in a world that makes so many people feel lost and unwelcome.

In comparison to the previous years, the shortlisted books are rather short: five of them do not exceed 303 pages, meanwhile the only one left - Creation Lake - tips the scales at 404 pages. This year’s shortest book, Orbital, weighing in at a mere 136 pages, also covers the shortest timeframe of all the novels on the list - just 24 hours aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is just four pages longer than the shortest-ever Booker winner - Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, winner of the 1979 prize.

The Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place on the evening of Tuesday, November 12 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.

Source: thebookerprizes.com