The author of Wandering Stars, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about the impact of his cultural heritage on his storytelling, and his journey from reader to writer
Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange is an American novelist, born and raised in Oakland, California. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program in New Mexico
Orange is a speaker for colleges, universities, and libraries, where he talks about his craft, the writing process, and Native American history and culture. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. His debut novel, There There, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and received the 2019 American Book Award. Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood hailed it as an ‘astonishing literary debut’. Wandering Stars, second book, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
This centuries-spanning epic paints a vivid portrait of the Native American experience in a society that often fails to recognise the value of its Indigenous people
The 2024 judges on Wandering Stars
All nominated books
A tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope
Features
- Book recommendations
The 2024 longlistees on the book that inspired them to become a writer
- Book extract