Edmund de Waal, Chair of judges

What sets the Booker Prize apart from other literary awards? Is there something special or unique about it? 

The Booker Prize has a history of 55 years of finding and sharing fiction. The prize is undoctrinaire, capacious, celebrating books with a deep, radical generosity. If you look at the library of books that have been longlisted, shortlisted or have won the Booker, it is a whole landscape of surprising, moving and challenging novels. There are books here that I found discomforting, books that altered how I think and books that have given me solace. I think of the Booker as a prize that is a threshold, a place looking forward into the truly new with a glorious sense of the richness of literature behind it. Thresholds are places of risk. The Booker knows this.

What are you hoping to find in selecting books for the Booker Prize 2024 longlist, and what are you seeking in a potential winner? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for? 

I need books to work for me sentence by sentence – to have a cellular grip on language. No cliché. No muddling along, no taking the reader for granted. I want to find books that are essential, books that you need other people to read, the novel that you cannot shut up about, a novel to start conversations. And deepen them. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to find a winner that lights up our winter. I want a book that has heart. That is my imperative. 

Please tell us about one of your favourite Booker Prize-nominated books from previous years (not necessarily a winner), and why you would recommend it to readers. 

‘Male or female? It can’t be both.’ ‘Who says? Why must it?’ Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, shortlisted ten years ago in 2014, is a fiercely inventive weaving together of two stories, of a 15th century painter of frescoes in Italy and a 16-year-old girl in contemporary England who has recently lost her mother. This novel is so many things and moves between so many registers but is not remotely in thrall to cleverness. It is a book about mourning, an exhilarating, gripping take on making art, and also somehow a meditation on what endures. It is a beautiful example of a book that takes no prisoners in its ambition and will make you cry. Well, it made me cry.

Booker Prize judges have to read well over a hundred books over the course of the prize season, as well as reading several books multiple times. How do you manage such a daunting task, and what are your tips for readers who would like to read more books but struggle to fit reading around their busy schedules? 

It is a challenging task to become a judge for the Booker. You are taken aside and the landscape of your year of reading is spread out before you. It is mountainous. But the task is made so much more exciting and positive because you are reading alongside the other judges. And their views and reactions, their challenges, deepen your own reading. Reading is necessarily a solitary act – that beautiful listening in to the voices of books – but the sharing of the experience of reading is so dynamic. So my Booker year is the best kind of book club. 

My advice, for what it is worth, is to find a book buddy. Talking about books is a generative act – it makes reading more a natural part of everyday life. ‘Where have you got to with X? What is next?’ It is the perfect strategy for more and more. And carry a book. Everywhere. It is in all those small interstices of time that you can read. 

Sara Collins

What sets the Booker Prize apart from other literary awards? Is there something special or unique about it?

I’ve judged a number of literary prizes but none of those experiences has been anything like judging the Booker. The first difference (for me) is quality. The expectation is that Booker submissions will consistently represent the best the novel can do, as well as gesturing towards where the form might be heading.  I have always thought of the Booker shortlist as a benchmark of literary excellence.  

The second is reputation, by which I mean not just the distinguished history of the prize but also its enormous global impact.  When Marlon James won for A Brief History of Seven Killings, it felt like a seismic shift in the possibilities for Caribbean literature. I remember celebrating as if it had been a victory for all Jamaicans, not just for Marlon. It has been like that in many other countries where authors may otherwise have struggled to attract attention to their work. The Booker is a bit like the Olympic gold medal of book awards in that sense.

What are you hoping to find in selecting books for the Booker Prize 2024 longlist, and what are you seeking in a potential winner? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for? 

I’m looking for a book that makes me jealous of people who haven’t read it yet. No matter how sophisticated or literary or demanding a book is, I still read for the same reason I fell in love with books as a child – I want to be lifted out of the here and now and into an experience that unsettles, re-arranges, or illuminates reality. I have very broad reading tastes, and I think it’s important when judging a prize like this to be open-minded and to be willing to be surprised. But, in a general sense, I love books that leave you with the feeling that you have changed – and that the world has changed – after reading them.

Please tell us about one of your favourite Booker Prize-nominated books from previous years (not necessarily a winner), and why you would recommend it to readers. 

One of my favourite Booker books from any time period is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (the 2017 winner). For the first three pages I found myself wondering what the hell was happening, and for the last three I found myself speechless with admiration, and mourning the fact that the book didn’t go on forever. That’s exactly the experience I look for when reading. Lincoln is a book that requires work on the part of the reader, but it rewards that effort artfully, and soulfully.  

Booker Prize judges have to read well over a hundred books over the course of the prize season, as well as reading several books multiple times. How do you manage such a daunting task, and what are your tips for readers who would like to read more books but struggle to fit reading around their busy schedules? 

It feels mostly effortless when the books are this good, though my energy did fade a bit as we approached the 150-book threshold!

It helps to stick to a disciplined reading schedule, treating it like work to be done at appointed times and giving it priority in the diary. Having said that, I know I’m on to a potential winner when I come across a book I can’t bear to put down. There were a few that I ended up propping in front of me while doing dishes or on the Stair-master, or that caused me to miss my Tube stop several times. I can’t wait to be able to tell everyone which ones they were.  When a book is that good, I find it’s never a struggle to fit the reading in; it’s a struggle to fit everything else in! Anyone who loves reading will know what I mean.

Yiyun Li

What sets the Booker Prize apart from other literary awards? Is there something special or unique about it?

The history of the Booker Prize and its outreach make it one of the most internationally-known awards. Of course I’m saying this based on anecdotal evidence, not strict statistics, but I have friends from outside the literary circle and the publishing world (and some of them grew up outside the US and the UK) who make it a priority to read the winners and shortlisted books of the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize every year. This makes me aware of the presence of the Booker Prize among the global readers. 

What are you hoping to find in selecting books for the Booker Prize 2024 longlist, and what are you seeking in a potential winner? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for? 

Things I consciously look for while reading in general and reading for this year’s longlist:

1. The quality of the thinking behind a novel. A novel is not a TV show; when we finish a show we can flip to another channel for a new show. A great novel provokes thoughts and questions. Sometimes these thoughts and questions stay with me for weeks or months, and that is always a good sign that I’ve read a great novel. 

2. The quality of the writing. A novel can be based on a genius idea or a superb concept, but the writing also needs to be intellectually and artistically thrilling and engaging for the novel to be great. 

3. The novel as a thing with a life. This may be vague and subjective, but I have noticed that some books can be perfectly written but they feel like artificial flowers, every petal in the right shape and with the right colour, and yet there is no life in it. Books that live on in a reader’s mind are like real flowers. We don’t marvel at how perfectly symmetrical the petals are, or how flawless every leaf is. For the same reason, a great book doesn’t always make me conscious of the craft behind it. Rather, we feel the life in the great novels as the bees and butterflies and hummingbirds feel drawn to the real flowers.

Please tell us about one of your favourite Booker Prize-nominated books from previous years (not necessarily a winner), and why you would recommend it to readers. 

Reading Turgenev by William Trevor, which is half of a book – there are two short novels collected in the same volume, with the title Two Lives. I don’t know if I am a hundred percent correct but I think Reading Turgenev might be the only time that half of a book was shortlisted for the Booker. I have reread it many times, but even when I am not actively rereading it the book lives in my consciousness, and sometimes a sentence comes to my mind while I am writing or cooking or walking. I can’t think of a better way to describe what literature means to me. 

Booker Prize judges have to read well over a hundred books over the course of the prize season, as well as reading several books multiple times. How do you manage such a daunting task, and what are your tips for readers who would like to read more books but struggle to fit reading around their busy schedules? 

I must confess that I live by reading books – I easily spend five to eight hours a day reading, so this reading task is not tremendously daunting. I have simply switched readings of my own selection with a set of assigned readings. I understand that this is not the case for most people. However, I have always advocated for slow and steady reading. I don’t suppose we live in a busier time than people in the past, but we live in a time with many more distractions. I always tell my students that instead of getting online or looking at their phone first thing in the morning, they can spend 15 to 20 minutes reading a chapter of War and Peace. If they do that, by the end of a 12-week semester, they can finish reading the entire book. For readers who want to fit more reading into their lives, perhaps set up a reading corner where screens of any kind (phones and tablets and computers) are not allowed?

Justine Jordan

What sets the Booker Prize apart from other literary awards? Is there something special or unique about it?

The luxurious amount of attention: devoting enough time and mental space so that five minds can consider every book. As a literary journalist I’m interested in every prize, but the Booker is the one non-book nerds notice. It’s the one that galvanises opinion, whether or not the books in question have been read, and prompts headlines each year about the parlous state of literary fiction.

What are you hoping to find in selecting books for the Booker Prize 2024 longlist, and what are you seeking in a potential winner? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for? 

Every book is different – that’s the point of them – and you have to follow the books, so the glorious answer is: the unknown. I’ve read rewarding novels this year that I’d press on some friends or acquaintances, but not all: the goal with the winner is an ambitious, surprising book, that’s both satisfying to finish and deep enough to reward repeated readings, which the panel would recommend to everyone, for its brilliance as a whole, beyond subject or style. A book that sets out to do something new, and achieves it; that both captures our time, and will last; that changes the reader. To me, that means the language above all.

Please tell us about one of your favourite Booker Prize-nominated books from previous years (not necessarily a winner), and why you would recommend it to readers. 

It’s probably time I stopped banging on about The Bee Sting, so: I have a special place in my heart for Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, shortlisted in 2007. She’s such a weird, wonderful, utterly unique writer, and I think this is her best. Set in Ashford, Kent, and featuring a large cast of contemporary eccentrics and one medieval court jester, it’s an 800-page wild picaresque about the way we get possessed by history, language, ideas, whims. It makes the case for comedy as the genre to reflect and encompass the world. I read it with a newborn, and it was my one distraction/escape from babyworld, every minute spent reading stolen from valuable sleeping time. This might explain why my memories of it are so fittingly odd and intense.

Booker Prize judges have to read well over a hundred books over the course of the prize season, as well as reading several books multiple times. How do you manage such a daunting task, and what are your tips for readers who would like to read more books but struggle to fit reading around their busy schedules? 

I read as much as possible in my day job as fiction editor for the Guardian, so I’ve been lucky that this process is symbiotic. If you love books, being faced with 150 in a row is like a very long, very spoiled and very solitary Christmas morning – not everything you unwrap is brilliant, but it’s all exciting. I’m really looking forward to the rereading, as normally I’m forced – or tempted – always to move on to the new.

Reading and concentration are increasingly difficult: I read a listicle about it. Tip one, I guess, is to put your phone in a different room, and to replace scrolling with a book when eating, commuting or being stood up on dates. We swim in a sea of words, these days, so I’d also recommend turning to the classics – a voice from another time can cut more clearly through the contemporary verbiage. But mostly, the phone thing.

Nitin Sawhney

What sets the Booker Prize apart from other literary awards?

The Booker Prize for me is the most inspiring of all the literary awards, as I have historically found myself most drawn to the nominees and winners in my reading.

As a current Booker Prize judge, I really enjoy the process of how closely the Booker Prize team and judges work together.  There is a very good ethic and integrity around ensuring how the award is determined.

What are you hoping to find in selecting books for the Booker Prize 2024 longlist, and what are you seeking in a potential winner? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for? 

I am hoping to find cultural relevance, an exciting and engaging prose style, an immersive and thought-provoking narrative and an original idea.

Please tell us about one of your favourite Booker Prize-nominated books from previous years (not necessarily a winner), and why you would recommend it to readers. 

I was really captivated by Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which was nominated in 1996. This novel beautifully explored the complexities of human relationships and resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.   Set in India during the 1970’s, this book skillfully depicted the harsh realities of the caste system, poverty, corruption and social injustices of that turbulent decade whilst also highlighting the power of compassion and collective action. It was a very elegantly crafted book.

Booker Prize judges have to read well over a hundred books over the course of the prize season, as well as reading several books multiple times. How do you manage such a daunting task, and what are your tips for readers who would like to read more books but struggle to fit reading around their busy schedules? 

I find that, as much as possible, adhering to a schedule of reading is the best way to work through so many books.  Personally, I like to read between 5am and 9am, when I have a clear mind, before I properly begin my day. It’s important to approach each book one page at a time until you find yourself unable to put it down. A great book compels you to keep reading until the end.