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 2024 judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 are: 

• James (Mantle) by Percival Everett (American)
• Orbital (Jonathan Cape) by Samantha Harvey (British)
• Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner (American)
• Held (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Anne Michaels (Canadian)
• The Safekeep (Viking) by Yael van der Wouden (Dutch)
• Stone Yard Devotional (Sceptre) by Charlotte Wood (Australian)

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 
• Two authors who have been previously shortlisted for the prize, several international bestsellers and one debut 
• 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 first nomination for Pan Macmillan imprint Mantle, and two nominations for Jonathan Cape, in the imprint’s first appearance since 2019
• ‘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,’ according to Chair of judges Edmund de Waal

The judges chose the final six novels from 13 longlisted titles – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – which were selected from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 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, 12 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.

‘“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.’

‘I’ve said before what a wonderful group this year’s judges are, but it may be worth repeating: their collective inclinations as readers, their respect for each other, and their sense of solidarity with the writers have all made for a very rewarding year.

‘That’s reflected in the response to the longlist, which has been hugely popular with readers, booksellers and critics alike.

‘Inevitably, the judges found it very hard to relinquish seven of those books, but the rules are the rules… The six books on the shortlist bring a diversity of perspective, style and subject matter, from those that hold the reader close to those that take the reader for a spin. It’s a pleasure to bring new authors to the Booker library and welcome back those who have been here before, and I can’t wait for even more readers to immerse themselves in the worlds created by all of this year’s cohort.’

Percival Everett was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 for The Trees. He is the author of over 30 published works, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and his novel Erasure was adapted to become the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction.

Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018 for The Mars Room. Her work has been translated into 27 languages and she has won the Prix Médicis, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Folio Prize.

Samantha Harvey is shortlisted for the first time, but was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize that year. Her novels have been shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Women’s Prize, and she published a memoir about her insomnia, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, in 2020. 

While the three other writers may be new to the Booker Prize, two of them have won and been nominated for multiple literary prizes. Anne Michaels is best known for her poetry and for her 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, which won 12 international awards, was adapted into a film in 2007 and included in the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. 

Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things won Australia’s $50,000 Stella Prize and a number of others in 2016. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia and named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. She is the first Australian author to be shortlisted in a decade, following Richard Flanagan in 2014, who went on to win the prize with The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The 2024 shortlist features one debut novel: The Safekeep. Yael van der Wouden – the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize – teaches creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. She was raised trilingual and wrote The Safekeep in English. Her other writing includes non-fiction – her essay ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’ received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018 – and an online advice column, Dear David, in which she answers people’s problems posing as Sir David Attenborough.

The shortlist includes five publishing imprints with strong Booker credentials. Two of the six books are published by Jonathan Cape (Creation Lake and Orbital), with the others published by Viking (The Safekeep), Sceptre (Stone Yard Devotional), Bloomsbury (Held) and Mantle (James). Cape has published six previous Booker winners, in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1984, 1991, and 2011. Bloomsbury last won the prize in 2017 with George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, and Viking last won in 1995 with Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road. Sceptre titles have been shortlisted four times previously. Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, appears on the shortlist for the first time.

James by Percival Everett

The author said: ‘Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.’

The judges said: ‘This is a book that subverts all expectations, as well as further establishing its author as a masterful storyteller. The narrative experimentation challenges traditional genre conventions. It’s a book that compels us to question, and reflect on, the nature of morality, the corrupting influence of power and the resilience of the human spirit. Its universal themes of identity, freedom and justice will resonate with contemporary readers, despite the book presenting initially as the retelling of a classic novel.’

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The author said: ‘I wanted to write about our human occupation of low Earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.’ 

The judges said: ‘It blurs the distinctions between borders, time zones and our own individual stories, provides a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before, and is infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter, an act of worship. A brief yet miraculously expansive novel, it offers us a vision of our planet as borderless and interlinked, and makes the case for co-operation and respect for our shared humanity.’

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

The author said: ‘I had long wanted to tell a story about a group of young people who decamp from Paris to a rural outpost in France, where they are set on a collision course with the French state. At the same time, I became interested in prehistory, both what can be known about ancient people and what the longing to know actually is, a sense that we have taken a wrong turn, that our ancestors hid messages from us that we don’t know how to read.’

The judges said: ‘Novels that investigate what it is to be human can veer into the sentimental; this one is utterly flinty and hard-nosed. It’s quite something to wrap a novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. There’s also mystery at the book’s core – both the mystery of human origins and of individual identity. The author’s prose is juicy, her narrator jaunty, her worldbuilding lush, and she also taps into something profound.’

Held by Anne Michaels

The author said: ‘Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now? We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to.’

The judges said: ‘We loved the quietness of this book, and surrendered to it. Its large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of its details. There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel. Starting with a wounded soldier on a French battlefield, this lyrical kaleidoscope of a novel is created from the scattered images and memories of four generations of a family.’

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

The author said: [The book was inspired by] ‘A short story I once wrote about three siblings out for dinner and the additional girlfriend everyone hates; a fascination with how the Dutch narrativise national histories; wanting to explore desire as the flipside of repulsion. The way it happened was like this: I was on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.’

The judges said: ‘This is a compelling and atmospheric story of obsession and secrets. It’s a novel that explores the things that are kept from us as children, and the things we tell ourselves about our own hidden desires. A quietly devastating queer love story which reveals itself to be a story of the Holocaust, it shows how alternate truths are held in fissile connection, something that is relevant to today’s world.’

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

The author said: ‘Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community. Writing it during pandemic lockdowns, followed by a serious illness – and the way these twin upheavals demolished so many of our consoling certainties – gave me an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in my work. I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book.’

The judges said: ‘A fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence. It is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of the human mind: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner. It chronicles one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world – and her life – when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms. ‘

Read the full interviews with the authors here. 

For more on this year’s judges, read interviews with them here. For background on how judges are chosen, read Chief Executive Gaby Wood’s feature here.

The impact of winning the prize is significant. Last year’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, saw a 1500% increase in sales in the week following its win. Before its longlisting, the book’s publisher, Oneworld, had sold 4,000 copies in hardback. Over 100,000 hardback copies have now been sold in the UK. It reached number three in the Sunday Times bestseller listin the UK for hardback fiction. In Ireland, it stayed at number one across all books for several weeks after the win. 

Internationally, Oneworld has printed 170,000 export trade paperbacks, with exceptionally strong sales in Ireland, Australia and India; Grove Press has sold more than 90,000 hardbacks and eBooks in North America. Translation rights deals increased from two before Prophet Song’s longlisting to 13 before its win. A total of 33 deals have now been secured, with a number of publishers buying Lynch’s complete backlist too.

On Saturday, 12 October, readers will be introduced to the shortlisted books at the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival by the newspapers’ Chief Literary Critic Johanna Thomas-Corr as she interviews the authors (either in person or virtually) and presents the premiere of this year’s shortlist films, produced by Merman. Tickets can be booked here.

Celebrations in the run up to the winner announcement on Tuesday, 12 November will begin with the shortlisted authors appearing at an event hosted by Waterstones Deansgate in Manchester on Saturday, 9 November. Tickets will be available at waterstones.com from tomorrow. 

The prize’s annual shortlist readings featuring the authors in conversation at Southbank Centre will follow on Monday, 11 November in the Royal Festival Hall. Tickets go on sale to Southbank Centre Members on Wednesday, 18 September and to the general public on Thursday, 19 September at southbankcentre.co.uk 

Details of all Booker Prize events can be found here. 

Premier: [email protected]/ Hannah Stockton, +44 (0) 7780 705 086