The Booker Prize 2024

‘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.’

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 Toíbín, Peter Carey and Elif Shafak.

Born in Nottingham, de Waal apprenticed with the renowned potter Geoffrey Whiting from 1981 to 1983, and went on to study English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1986.

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.

He has collaborated with a number of poets, performers, musicians and other visual artists, including the photographer Sally Mann and the choreographer Wayne McGregor. His library of exile, a pavilion originally exhibited within the Ateneo Veneto during the 2019 Venice Biennale, brought together two thousand books, most in translation, by exiled writers from Ovid’s time to the present day. The project travelled to Dresden, Germany and then to the British Museum. In 2021 the books were donated to the University of Mosul library in Iraq, which was destroyed in 2015.

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. 

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.   

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.  

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.     

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.  

The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. The impact of the award is significant.

In the week following Paul Lynch’s 2023 win for Prophet Song, the novel was described as ‘a prophetic masterpiece’ by the Washington Post and ‘a crucial book for our current times’ by the Guardian and saw UK sales increase by 1,630%. Prior to being longlisted for the Booker Prize, international rights to Prophet Song had been sold in two territories. Two weeks after its win, rights had been sold across 18 countries.   

Just three weeks after winning, UK publisher Oneworld printed 230k copies (190k for UK and export; 40k in Australia and India). The book hit number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list for hardback fiction for two weeks running and was number one across all books in Ireland.

Prophet Song was also published on December 5 in the US by Grove Atlantic, with an initial print run of more than 90k hardbacks.