‘Timely and timeless’ longlist for the Booker Prize 2024 is announced
The 2024 longlist for the Booker Prize – the world’s most influential prize for a single work of fiction – is announced today, Tuesday, July 30, 2024
The longlist of 13 books – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – has been chosen by the 2024 judging panel. The 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.
Their selection was made from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 and submitted to the prize by publishers. The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
The judges’ selection includes:
- Strong new voices – including three debut novelists – alongside international bestselling authors and six writers previously nominated for the prize
- The first Dutch and first Native American authors to be longlisted, the first Australian in eight years, one British-Libyan writer, and authors from Canada, the UK, Ireland and the US
- A strong showing of Americans displays a range of experience, from a first-time novelist to the author of more than 20 novels
- Blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic
- Eight women and five men
- The first nomination for Pan Macmillan imprint Mantle, and four nominations for Jonathan Cape, in the imprint’s first longlisting since 2019
- ‘Works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments,’ according to Chair of judges Edmund de Waal, who adds that these are works that have ‘made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others’
Read: 13 things you need to know about the Booker Prize 2024 longlist here
The Booker Prize 2024 longlist
The 2024 longlist is:
Colin Barrett (Irish) Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape)
Rita Bullwinkel (American) Headshot (Daunt Originals)
Percival Everett (American) James (Mantle)
Samantha Harvey (British) Orbital (Jonathan Cape)
Rachel Kushner (American) Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape)
Hisham Matar (British/Libyan) My Friends (Viking)
Claire Messud (Canadian/American) This Strange Eventful History (Fleet)
Anne Michaels (Canadian) Held (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Tommy Orange (American) Wandering Stars (Harvill Secker)
Sarah Perry (British) Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape)
Richard Powers (American) Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Yael van der Wouden (Dutch)The Safekeep (Viking)
Charlotte Wood (Australian) Stone Yard Devotional (Sceptre)
The Booker Prize 2024 longlist
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges, says:
‘After seven months and 156 novels it is a great moment to be able to hand over this glorious longlist of urgent, resonant books for the Booker Prize 2024: a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices.
‘One of the true markers of the novels that we have chosen is that we feel they are necessary books, fiction that has made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others. To reach the end of a novel and to be deeply moved and be unable to work out quite how that has happened is a great gift.
‘This is timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake. Here are books that unfold with quietness and stealth, as well as books that are incendiary. There are books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return. Crossing borders and crossing generations we find ourselves in a boxing ring in the US, in a small Irish town, in a convent in Australia, deep underground in rural France. We have one book on the list exploring deep oceans, another navigating outer space, a third tracking a comet. These are not books “about issues”: they are works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments, their singularity in a world that can be indifferent or hostile. The precarity of lives runs through our longlist like quicksilver.
‘But there is no single register here. We need fiction to do different things – to renew us, give solace, to take us away from ourselves and give us back to ourselves in an expanded and reconnected way. And, of course, to entertain us.
‘We think our longlist does all of this and we hope you agree.’
Booker Prize 2024 Chair of judges, Edmund de Waal photographed at his studio in London
© Tom PilstonGaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds:
‘This year’s Booker Prize judges are a wonderful group – perceptive readers and generous listeners, led with erudition, lightness and warmth by Edmund de Waal. The fact that they’ve been so happy to keep returning to each other’s company to discuss what they’ve read has made the process unusually productive. There are a few books on this list that were revisited as a result of particular eloquence on the part of individual judges, and that strikes me as the very best aspect of the Booker judging process: judges show each other what they see, and the books shift on re-reading.
‘This panel found joy, entertainment, emotion and solace in many of the books submitted – which resulted not only in a superb selection of books for readers with a range of tastes, but also in their gratitude to more writers than they were in a position to reward. They wished their longlist could have been twice as long.’
Gaby Wood
© Clara MoldenMore information about the longlist
Three books on the longlist are debut novels: Wild Houses by Colin Barrett, Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden – who is the first Dutch author to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. The debut novelists are not, however, new to the literary world. Barrett’s short story collection Young Skins was highly acclaimed, and one of its stories, ‘Calm with Horses’, was adapted into an award-winning 2019 feature film starring Barry Keoghan. Rita Bullwinkel’s writing has appeared in the White Review, BOMB, and McSweeney’s, where she is now editor. Yael van der Wouden’s ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’ was selected as a notable essay of 2017 in the Best American Essays book series, edited by Robert Atwan and Hilton Als – and her writing has appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, The Offing and Elle.com.
Should any of them win the Booker Prize, they would be in good company. Debut novels have claimed the Booker Prize six times, among them The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and, most recently, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.
Half of this year’s longlistees are no strangers to a Booker Prize nomination. British-Libyan author Hisham Matar and Canadian-American writer Claire Messud were longlisted together in 2006 (for In the Country of Men and The Emperor’s Children respectively), with Matar progressing to the shortlist that year. Rachel Kushner and Richard Powers appeared together on the 2018 shortlist, with The Mars Room and The Overstory. Powers had been longlisted four years earlier for Orfeo, and went on to be shortlisted again in 2021, for Bewilderment. Percival Everett, the author of over 20 novels, was shortlisted in 2022 for The Trees, while Samantha Harvey was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness.
And a number of this year’s authors are familiar with the bestseller lists. The Essex Serpent (2016) by Sarah Perry was a huge word-of-mouth hit, topping the UK charts and selling 200,000 hardbacks, before being adapted into a successful Apple TV+ series. Over a million copies of Richard Powers’ 2018 Booker Prize-shortlisted The Overstory have been sold around the world, while Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room was a number-one bestseller in 2018, and Time magazine’s number-one fiction title of the year. Tommy Orange – the first Native American author on the longlist – had a New York Times bestseller with his debut novel There There. Anne Michaels’ work has been translated into 50 languages.
Between them, the 13 longlisted authors have written over 100 books. Around 50 of those 100 have been written by Percival Everett, Richard Powers and Anne Michaels.
Exile, displacement, identity and belonging are among the big themes in several books on the 2024 longlist. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood – who is the first Australian author to be longlisted since the South African-Australian author J.M. Coetzee in 2016 – follows a woman who leaves her life behind to take refuge in an isolated nunnery in New South Wales. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange –who is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and the first Native American author to be nominated – is ‘an eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the dislocation and forced assimilation of Native Americans’, according to NPR. Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History tells the story of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family in their migrations around the world. Hisham Matar’s My Friends follows two Libyan students caught up in a violent demonstration in London, and was described by the Guardian as ‘a book about exile and violence and grief’.
There’s something for every reader on this year’s list. Two of the longlisted books are rooted in the most popular fiction genre of them all: crime. Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses has been described as an ‘exhilarating thriller’ (TLS) and a ‘deftly told caper’ (Guardian), while Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake ‘fuses a spy thriller with philosophical meditation’ according to The Bookseller. The selection is also shot through with black humour: ‘Gripping, painful, funny and horrifying’ is how the Guardian described Percival Everett’s reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, while also praising the book’s ‘deft humour, comic set pieces and great lightness of touch’. The cover blurb for Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot – this year’s Booker novel about women’s sport – describes it as ‘funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic’, while Rachel Kushner’s publishers summarise Creation Lake as ‘a work of high art, high comedy and irresistible pleasure’.
The publishers represented on this year’s longlist include a pair that are independently-owned – Daunt (for Headshot) and Bloomsbury (for Held) – while Pan Macmillan imprint Mantle is nominated for the first time (for James). It’s a good Booker Prize year for Penguin Random House’s Jonathan Cape, which boasts four titles on the list (Wild Houses, Orbital, Creation Lake and Enlightenment), in the imprint’s first longlisting since 2019. Jonathan Cape has been part of Booker Prize history from the very beginning – its legendary publisher Tom Maschler was instrumental in setting up the prize with Booker McConnell Ltd in 1969 – and its Booker-winning authors include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Ben Okri, Anita Brookner and, most recently, Julian Barnes.
What our judges said about the longlist
‘With two collections behind him, Barrett is well established as a master both of the short story and the sentence; his debut novel confirms and extends all his promise. Wild Houses is a propulsive, darkly comic and superlatively written account of frustration and misadventure in a small Irish town. Nicky is a self-reliant 17-year-old whose dreams of escape are slowly coming into focus when her hapless boyfriend Doll gets taken hostage by local goons over a drug debt; misfit Dev is reluctantly embroiled. The connections between the cast and the past tragedies that have forged them are expertly revealed in a slow-burn study of character and fate that’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Violence and farce mingle in a novel that feels as sharp, funny and bitingly bittersweet as life.’
‘A gripping and gutsy depiction of a young women’s boxing tournament in Nevada. In a compelling series of interconnected snapshots, Bullwinkel weaves a tapestry around several diverse, steely characters, each with their own unique backstories, motivations and perspectives. With great flair and candid detail, the author elevates the gritty physical realities of sport to a profound examination of identity, destiny and family dynamics, and of the transitory yet intense significance of human experience, lending the book a depth far beyond most sports fiction. An unflinching debut.’
‘A masterful, revisionist work that immerses the reader in the brutality of slavery, juxtaposed with a movingly persistent humanity. Through lyrical, richly textured prose, Everett crafts a captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn, that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency, James stands as a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation.’
‘Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.’
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
‘Sadie Smith – not her real name – is an FBI agent turned spy-for-hire, whose latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France. She’s an extraordinary creation: sharp-minded, iron-willed, accustomed to moving fast and breaking things. As she investigates the group, she hacks into emails from their guru, a shadowy eccentric who has withdrawn from modernity into the ancient caves that dot the landscape; he has some beguiling ideas about the role of Neanderthals through history. What’s so electrifying about this novel is the way it knits contemporary politics and power with a deep counter-history of human civilisation. We found the prose thrilling, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.’
‘Two young Libyan students meet at university in Edinburgh and make a decision to join the protests outside the Libyan embassy in London. Both are wounded when they are fired on. This powerful story of exile charts the aftermath of this moment as the friends navigate a world where they cannot rest, where both the idea and the reality of homeland is contingent and dangerous. My Friends is both a complex and unsentimental meditation on what friendship means and a searingly moving exploration of how exile impacts those who are forced to live in this state of loss. It is a book that we loved for its spareness of language and its deeply affecting storytelling.’
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
‘The novel opens in June 1940 when Paris falls to the Germans, a moment that, like many important historical events, casts a centrifugal force on people’s lives. The compelling narrative follows three generations of a Franco-Algerian family in their migrations around the world, from Algeria to the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and France. Epic in its scale, while intimately rooted in each character’s internal landscape, the novel reminds us how literature can be expansive and timeless.’
‘The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.’
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
‘This powerful epic entwines the stories of a diverse cast of characters, each grappling with the weight of history, identity and trauma. Through well-crafted prose and deftly drawn perspectives, Tommy Orange paints a vivid portrait of the Native American experience – both the pain of displacement and the resilience of those who continue ancestral traditions. Spanning centuries, the novel explores universal themes of family, addiction and the search for belonging in a society that often fails to recognise the value of its Indigenous people. Wandering Stars is a stunning achievement, a literary tour de force that demands attention.’
‘There are some novels which set out to take time, that have a certain confidence in their pacing. Enlightenment does this splendidly. This long and quiet book brings together a compression of place – a small town in 1990s Essex – and an exhilarating exploration of the heavens, comets, faith, ghosts, love. The novel takes its main characters – a middle-aged novelist and reporter for a local paper and the 17-year-old daughter of the local pastor – and weaves a novel of great ambition. This is a book of deep pleasures, full of passion for the life of ideas, richly and satisfyingly written.’
‘Economic motives quarrel with environmental ones and artificial intelligence poses threats as well as promises as the residents of a Polynesian island prepare to vote on a proposed seasteading project led by an unidentified American billionaire. This is a characterful, capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative in which Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display.’
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
‘Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.’
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
‘Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.’
The Booker Prize 2024 judges with the longlist
©Tom Pilston
The Booker Prize effect
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 list in 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.
Forthcoming announcements and events
The shortlist of six books will be announced on Monday, 16 September at an evening event in the Portico Rooms at Somerset House in London. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.
On Saturday, 12 October, the Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood, will be at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival to introduce readers to the Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted books, interview the authors (either in person or virtually), and to present the world premiere of this year’s shortlist films, produced by Merman. The festival’s full programme will be announced on Wednesday, 14 August.
The prize’s annual shortlist readings, featuring the authors, will take place at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in November. Full details to be announced on the Booker Prize’s events page here and at southbankcentre.co.uk.
The 2024 winner will be announced on Tuesday, 12 November at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner receives £50,000 and a trophy, named Iris after Booker Prize winner Iris Murdoch, and designed by the late Jan Pieńkowski.
Booker Prize 2023 winner author Paul Lynch (centre) and Chetna Maroo in conversation with Sara Collins at the Southbank Centre, London
© David Parry/Booker Prize FoundationThe Booker Prize Book Club and Reading Challenge
Readers are invited to join the conversation around the 2024 prize in the Booker Prize Book Club, a Facebook Group set up in 2023. A year-round community forum with over 20,000 members, the Book Club is a place for readers around the world to come together and explore Booker Prize-nominated books, old and new.
Next week will see the launch of the Booker Prize 2024 Reading Challenge, in which individuals and book clubs will be encouraged to read as many of the longlisted books as possible, sharing their thoughts and connecting with other readers via the Booker Prizes social channels, using the hashtag #BPReadingChallenge. The challenge will be supported with content on the Booker Prizes website, including extracts, interviews, and features, as well as downloadable assets to allow readers to track their progress.
Readers in the UK will be able to buy any of the books from our Reading Challenge list over at Bookshop.org, where every sale supports independent bookshops. Use the code Booker10 for 10% off at checkout, valid until midnight Monday, 12 August.
Libraries are invited to sign up for free Reading Challenge display materials here.
A stack of books.
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