Eight of the best Booker-nominated books written by poets

It should not be surprising to learn that many shortlisted and winning books across both the Booker and International Booker prizes are by authors who have also written poetry. After all, telling stories has long been a part of the poet’s role across cultures and traditions; while the prizes have always celebrated writers who use language in ways that allow us to see the world anew. As the Chair of the 2024 Booker Prize judges, Edmund de Waal told the Booker Prizes website recently, ‘I need books to work for me sentence by sentence – to have a cellular grip on language’. The sort of grip demonstrated by the best poets, then. 

The Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels made the 2024 shortlist with Held. (‘There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel,’ the 2024 judges said.) Michaels joins the likes of Ben Okri, Jon Fosse, Deborah Levy, Robin Robertson, Urszula Honek, A.S. Byatt, Ismail Kadare, Bernardine Evaristo, Michael Ondaatje, Maria Stepanova and Iris Murdoch on the growing list of Booker authors whose writing spans multiple genres, poetry included.  

There are also, unsurprisingly, many poet-translators in the Booker Library (such as Boris Dralyuk, Jen Calleja, George Szirtes and Michael Hofmann, who translated Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, winner of the International Booker Prize 2024). Their work is about far more than replicating a long text in another language, and is as much about capturing its tone, tempo and emotional depth. Naturally, a number of poets have helped judge the prizes over the years, too, from Stephen Spender in 1969 to Mary Jean Chan in 2023. 

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood 

Sometimes it feels like writers are shapeshifting angels, putting words together in whichever way feels most fitting to them, and leaving the rest of us (especially those who must sell books) to perform the more banal job of categorisation, whispering the question: on which shelf in the bookshop shall I put this?  

That seems true of Patricia Lockwood, at least for me. After two poetry collections and a highly acclaimed memoir, Priestdaddy, came her debut novel, No One is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, and takes its title from the language of social media (she has been described as the Poet Laureate of Twitter).  

Written in short, often tweet-length vignettes, the story’s first half follows its protagonist as she navigates the ‘Portal’ where ‘the voice she was hearing in this place, intimate, had spread like a regional fire across the globe’. Lockwood adopts the humour and manic compression of (2010s) Twitter to narrate a life spent online. The first half jams together a collision of registers, variously lyrical, scatological, and drily witty. ‘I have eaten / the blank / that were in / the blank’. 

In the second half, the narrative takes a wider focus as the protagonist’s insular life is exploded by her sister’s complicated pregnancy. She is left re-evaluating: ‘What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract? What had the politician promised us? The realtor, walking us through being’s beautiful house? Could we sue? We would sue! Could we blow it all open? We would blow it all open! Could we… could we post about it?’ 

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel 

Time Shelter confronts not the monsters of epic poetry like Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven or Beowulf’s Grendel, but the ‘one monster that stalks us all’: ‘old age’.  

The enigmatic Gaustine sets up a clinic for people with Alzheimer’s in which the past is painstakingly recreated in different rooms. The distinctive sights and smells, technologies and products of the recent past provide clients with therapeutic treatment for their memory loss. One client ‘would stand there like an aged boy trying to play hide-and-seek, but the game dragged on, the other kids had thrown in the towel, they’d gone home, they’d gotten old.’ 

The past soon becomes an appealing retreat not just for the old, but for wider populations across Europe. A referendum is held on the past in which each country chooses its happiest time, with unexpected results. Philosophical, astute and playful, Time Shelter is a jewel of Bulgarian literature and a worthy winner of the International Booker Prize in 2023. 

Gospodinov has said that, as a poet, he felt like an outsider to the world of long-form fiction. ‘I couldn’t possibly make myself write a novel that acted like a novel, that pretended to be a traditional novel. I wanted to speak directly to the reader. And, coming from poetry, I wanted every sentence to be important. That has always remained an element in what I write, that sentence-level focus associated more with poetry.’ 

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark 

Muriel Spark provides choice details about her protagonist in her knife of a novel, The Driver’s Seat. Lise works in an office and has lived in a one-room flat for ten years. She’s roughly 30 years old and she’s taking a holiday somewhere hot, possibly Naples in Italy. She decides to buy a garish dress that draws attention; ‘even here in this holiday environment Lise looks brighter’.  

Sometimes she laughs, she occasionally cries during her manic little trip. We are frequently told that her lips are ‘slightly parted’. But Lise’s mind is unknown. ‘Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?’ the narrator almost taunts. 

Spark’s use of foreshadowing in The Driver’s Seat transforms the technique into her own special weapon, informing the reader of her character’s unhappy fate long before it comes. And yet the intrigue and mystery remain, in subversion of conventional plotting. This taut novel is a haunting masterpiece, and was rightfully celebrated in 2010 when it appeared on the shortlist for the Lost Man Booker, a special edition of the prize for books published in 1970 which weren’t eligible at the time due to a rule change. 

Just in case you’re developing an idealised view of the poet figure, here is Spark’s description of her time editing the Poetry Review surrounded by petty, squabbling poets: ‘In no other job have I ever had to deal with such utterly abnormal people. Yes it is true, poetry does something to them.’ 

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein 

Speaking to the Booker Prizes website, Sarah Bernstein explained how Study for Obedience started life as ‘poems or micro fiction’ that she eventually realised ‘might be connected.’  

Bernstein’s interest in the sound of language (‘I tend to approach things through the sound of a line – so it’s almost like catching a musical phrase, and then trying to follow the logic of its sound, rather than its sense’) carries through to the unnamed narrator’s beguiling voice. She bears a heavy sense of guilt and unworthiness, ingrained in her since childhood, in which ‘no matter how I allowed myself to be used for the benefit of others, still goodness eluded me’.  

Having catered to her elder siblings’ every need while growing up, she returns to her brother’s side in adulthood after his wife leaves him. Moving to the unnamed country where he lives, she becomes his housekeeper.  

Her new home is in fact the location of historic persecution against her family’s Jewish ancestors. Her first interaction with the townspeople comes when she visits the main shop and writes her name on the community rota. From then on she senses ‘some feeling or intent bending towards me’.  

The sinister atmosphere builds when the narrator is blamed for livestock-related incidents in the town. Written in measured, darkly funny prose, Study for Obedience, shortlisted for the Booker in 2023, is an enigmatic portrayal of survival and self-blame.