Booker Prize organisers announce history-making shortlist

The Booker Prize organisers announced the shortlist for the 2024 edition on Tuesday at Somerset House’s Portico Rooms in London.

The shortlist includes five women and one man, making it the highest number of females ever shortlisted in its 55-year history.

Authors from five countries were shortlisted alongside the first Dutch writer and the first Australian author in a decade. Others are the first Australian in 10 years and British, Canadian and American authors. Two of the authors have been shortlisted previously.

The Booker Prize aims to encourage more publishing and reading of quality works of imagination worldwide and to recognise translators’ roles more fully.

The contribution of both author and translator is given equal recognition, including – a £50,000 cash prize, split between them and the iconic Iris trophy, named after renowned author Iris Murdoch.

In addition, each shortlisted author will receive:£2,500 a custom-bound, bespoke edition of their book.

While no Nigerian made this year’s longlist and shortlist, multiple Nigerian writers have been involved with the Booker Prize in the past, including winners and finalists. Chinua Achebe won in 2007, Ben Okri in 1991, and Bernardine Evaristo, a British-Nigerian author, won the Booker Prize in 2019, sharing the award with a Canadian novelist and poet, Margaret Atwood. Ayobami Adebayo was shortlisted in 2023, and Chigozie Obioma in 2015 and 2019.

The Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted books[Photo credit: The Booker Prize]

The shortlisted works

The 2024 judging panel selected six books from 156 works published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024.

The panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, 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.

The shortlisted works are James by Percival Everett, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, Held by Anne Michaels, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.

The 2024 International Booker Prize is a literary award for the best English-language novel published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

The prize has been awarded each year since 1969 to the best novel written in English by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland.

The Booker Prize 2024 winner will be announced at a ceremony on 12 November at Old Billingsgate in London and broadcast in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row at 9.30 p.m.