The Booker Prize 2024: Judges announced and submissions now open

‘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. 
 
Sara Collins is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019, became a Times bestseller, was translated into more than 15 languages and was broadcast as a four-part television drama on ITV in December 2022.  
 
Sara studied law at the London School of Economics before qualifying as a barrister in 1994. She worked as a lawyer for 17 years before obtaining a Master’s degree in creative writing with distinction from Cambridge University in 2016, where she was the recipient of the Michael Holroyd Prize.  
 
Sara is also a literary critic, screenwriter and broadcaster. She has been a frequent contributor and guest host on BBC Radio 4 and is a co-host of the Graham Norton Book Club Podcast on Audible. 
 
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. 

Yiyun Li is the author of 11 books, including Wednesday’s Child, The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End. Her novels and short stories have been translated into more than 20 languages. Li’s honours and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and others.  
 
Trained as a scientist, she is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a 2023 International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Harper’s, among other publications. She is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing programme at the Lewis Center for the Arts.  
 
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. 

Photos of the Booker Prize 2024 judges, social media graphics, and the prize logo are available here.  

The Booker Prizes exist to celebrate the world’s best fiction. The symmetrical relationship between the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize ensures that the Booker honours fiction on a global basis: outstanding fiction is highlighted by the prizes for English-speaking readers, whether that work was originally written in English (the Booker Prize) or translated into English (the International Booker Prize).    

The International Booker Prize – awarded annually in spring – is for the best single work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK and Ireland. The winner’s prize purse is £50,000; £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator(s). The winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, was met with both public and critical acclaim. Time Shelter sold 1,300 copies in hardback, before it was longlisted; 20,000 paperback copies were sold in the first ten days after it won the International Booker Prize. The judges for International Booker Prize 2024 are here.  

The website, thebookerprizes.com – supported by Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook accounts, as well as a YouTube channel and a Substack newsletter – is a unique online space which showcases the 600+ exceptional books that have won, or been longlisted or shortlisted, for the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize. The website aims to be an entertaining and illuminating content destination that combines both practical information about the prizes past and present with fresh and original features to bring the books and their authors to life and encourage readers new and old to visit and revisit titles in the ‘Booker Library’.  

The Booker Prize Podcast appears weekly on all podcast platforms, including Apple and   Spotify. Hosted by Jo Hamya and James Walton, it takes an informal and insightful look at the books, themes and trivia arising from over 50 years of the Booker’s history, and includes exclusive interviews with authors.   

In September, the Booker Prize Book Club was launched on Facebook, as a dedicated online community for readers all over the world to discuss and find out more about the shortlisted titles, as well as the 600+ titles in the Booker Library. The Book Club has over 7,000 members. 

The Booker Prize Foundation is a registered charity (no 1090049) established in 2002. Its purpose is to promote the art and value of literature for the public benefit and to inspire people to read the world’s best fiction. It is driven by a simple belief – great fiction not only brings joy to millions, it has the power to change the way we think about the world. It is responsible for awarding the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize. Other aspects of the Foundation’s work include the funding of Braille and audio editions of Booker Prize books through the RNIB, the annual UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and Books Unlocked, a long-standing reading initiative in prisons.  

Crankstart, a charitable foundation, is the exclusive funder of the Booker Prizes.   

Booker Group Ltd, which sponsored the prize from 1969 to 2001, is the UK’s leading food & drink wholesaler. The Booker Prizes license their name from Booker Ltd, and Helen Williams, a representative from Booker, sits on the Advisory Committee.