Five Women, One Man: Shortlist for Booker Prize 2024 Announced
The Booker Prize, one of the world's major literary awards, has announced the shortlist of books eligible for the award in 2024. It traditionally includes six titles.
This is reported on the prize's website.
These publications were chosen from a long list of 13 authors and their works. In total, 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 were submitted for this year's prize.
The prize jury included artist and writer Edmund de Waal, writer Sara Collins, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, writer and professor Yiyun Li, and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
The shortlist includes the largest number of women in the Booker Prize's 55-year history - five this time.
The list includes authors from five countries. They include British, Canadian, and American authors, the first Australian in 10 years, and the first Dutch writer in the history of the prize. Two of the authors have been shortlisted for the Booker before.
‘The list includes stories that take readers around the world and beyond the Earth's atmosphere: from the battlefields of World War I to a spiritual retreat in rural Australia; from the deep South of 19th century America to a remote Dutch home in the 1960s; from the International Space Station to a network of caves in the French countryside. Among other things, the shortlisted books explore the gravitational pull of home and family, the contradictory nature of truth and history, and the extent to which we reveal our true selves to others,’ the organisers of the prize noted.
The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024:
- Held by Anne Michaels;
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner;
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey;
- James by Percival Everett;
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden;
- Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.
The winner of this year's Booker Prize, who will receive £50,000 and an Iris statuette, will be announced in London on 12 November 2024.
The Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards. It was first awarded in 1969 to Percy Howard Newby for his novel 'Something to Answer For'.
Initially, it was awarded to an author living in a UK country for a novel written in English. However, since 2014, it has been open to writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK.