Last night, 16th September 2024, the shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 was announced at an event held at Somerset House’s Portico Rooms in London and livestreamed to readers around the world.

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

The shortlist of six novels features:

• The largest number of women in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history, with five women and one man represented

• Authors from five countries, including the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted, the first Australian in 10 years, as well as British, Canadian, and American authors

• Stories which transport readers around the world and beyond the 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

• Books that 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 2024 Shortlist is:

James by Percival Everett - "An important, brilliant, perception-altering retelling of an American literary classic."

Orbital by Samantha Harvey - "Soulfully beautiful, this majestic novella explores the magic, meaning and fragility of life as six astronauts orbit the earth."

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner - "Beneath this taut, dazzling story about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history."

Held by Anne Michaels - "Through luminous moments of chance, change, and even grace, Michaels shows us our humanity."

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden - "An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge." 

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood - "A fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence."

The judges chose the final six novels from 13 longlisted titles – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – which were selected from 156 books published between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024 and submitted to the prize by publishers. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book. They also gain global readerships and an increase in profile and sales.

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

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 2023 Prize went to Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

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