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. 

These days, in most people’s minds, poetry is best known for its economy of language, its vivid imagery, its figurative (rather than literal) descriptions and its foregrounding of sound and rhythm. But long-form fiction – even when it focuses on character, plot, social relationships and world-building – can have these qualities, too. And in the Booker Library, it often does.  

In her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark said she felt that the novel was ‘essentially a variation of a poem’ and that she thought of herself predominantly as a poet, despite being the author of over 20 novels, two of which were shortlisted for the Booker. Spark was perhaps fighting a losing battle with her public image. The novel’s greater popularity, in terms of sheer sales figures, may explain why some writers’ poetry careers can be overlooked if they have success with other literary forms.  

Acknowledged or not, the poetic discipline has long played a profound role in the development of many authors’ fictional work. In a 2016 interview, Sarah Bernstein said that ‘once I began reading poetry, and especially poetry that experiments with form, I started writing different kinds of things.’ 

What is the nature of this influence? Is there such thing as a ‘poet’s novel’ – and, if so, what might that look like? In the New Yorker, Laura Miller described the stereotypical ‘poet’s novel’ as being ‘introspective, replete with long passages of description, and scant of plot’.  

But a stereotype is just that. The actual ways poetry influences fiction are as varied as the people who write it: as there are many ways to be a poet, so there are many ways to be a poet-novelist.  

The list below demonstrates the rich variety within the novel form and the poet’s stubborn resistance to cliché. More than any stylistic tricks or aesthetic patterns, what strikes me as their most distinctive feature is each book’s unique vision. 

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?’ 

The Sellout by Paul Beatty 

A celebrated poet before he wrote novels, Paul Beatty was crowned first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, in 1990, though is now probably better known as the first American winner of the Booker Prize, in 2016.  

The Sellout, his prize-winning fourth novel, is a confrontational, absurd tale of a Black man who lands in the Supreme Court after attempting to reinstate race segregation and slavery in his Californian hometown.  

It is hard to do justice to the dense brilliance of each page as Beatty demolishes American complacency and pieties. The novel’s meandering narrative and heady atmosphere is packed with allusions, with twisted echoes of Tennyson and Orwell. With its wild inversions and savage wit, The Sellout has been placed by many critics in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift, although Beatty has said he doesn’t think of himself as a satirist.  

It is a violently funny book – and violently sad. Its excoriating portrayal of contemporary race debates and the legacy of slavery only feels more relevant with time. 

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.’ 

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches 

Boulder by Spanish author Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches, fits at least some of the stereotypes of a ‘poet’s novel’. At a slim 105 pages, it has the poet’s compression. It is also somewhat introspective, as its first-person narrative unspools the protagonist’s thoughts and occasionally tumultuous feelings. But the eponymous Boulder, as her nickname suggests, is hard and solitary by nature. Insights are hard-won.  

After she meets and falls in love with Samsa, Boulder’s peripatetic life as a ship’s cook becomes more moored. The two move in together, in Samsa’s native Iceland, and Boulder sets up a business making empanadas. When Samsa decides to have a baby, she is tentatively supportive. But motherhood is all-encompassing and transforms Samsa and their relationship. Boulder is repelled. ‘She’s given up her life, found religion,’ she says.  

But for all her ambivalence towards the obligations of care and Samsa’s almost cult-like new community, Boulder manages to find moments with her young daughter Tinna where new, meaningful modes of parenthood can develop.  

Boulder is a sensual, nuanced novel that forms part of a loose trilogy. Baltasar has said that in writing these books she has not moved away from poetry since ‘that is the job of poets – to love language, to dance with it – and it’s something that can be done when writing prose.’ 

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.’ 

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 

Margaret Atwood has published 18 books of poetry and 18 books of fiction. In her humble introduction to her poem on grief, Dearly (2020), she writes, ‘You can’t work easily on a novel while watching two plays a day. You can, however, scribble poetry. And so I did.’ 

Written over several years and published in 2003, Oryx and Crake – shortlisted for the Booker in 2003 – is a speculative work of fiction featuring high human drama alongside a reckoning of some of the most morally ambiguous developments in science.  

The novel’s opening scenes take place in a postapocalyptic world populated by genetically modified animals such as pigoons and rakunks, and human-like beings known as Crakers. 

Not unexpectedly for a novel by an acclaimed poet, this is a book fully loaded with imagery and symbolism, from birds to the colour green. Throughout, Snowman, a human, cuts a lonely figure. His fragmentary flashbacks gradually reveal what went wrong and what became of his best friend Crake and lover Oryx.  

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. 

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd 

Japanese author Mieko Kawakami started a career as a singer, before changing tack and focusing on her writing. Her debut publication was a collection of poetry, released in 2006. 

Heaven, her second novel published in English, is narrated by an adolescent boy with a lazy eye, who is brutally bullied for the way he looks. He finds secret solidarity with a girl in his class, Koshima, who is treated equally badly for dressing in dirty clothes. 

Both teenagers are passive to their torment – Koshima believes their stoic acceptance has real meaning, but the narrator is simply unable to respond in any other way, and as the violence reaches shocking heights he plunges further into despondency. 

Heaven, shortlisted for the International Booker in 2022, is a deceptively simple novel whose precise prose reveals philosophical depth. Kawakami’s exploration of the meaning of suffering and authentic portrayal of early adolescence make it possible to see beyond the novel’s darkness. 

Writing in the Atlantic, Idra Novey noted that, like other poet-novelists, the attention to sensory experience in Kawakami’s work ‘is particularly keen, concise, and meaningful. Kawakami doesn’t just assemble a tactile detail and park it in a scene. Sensation itself drives her scenes, the way the senses can steer a poem.’