The Booker Prize 2024 shortlist has been announced
The Booker Prize 2024 shortlist has been announced and there are some real gems on this year's list. Unlike many years when I've only read one or two of the books on the list, this year''s selrection feels motre accessible. I particularly loved Samantha Harvey's otherworldly Orbital, set aboard a spaceship, and it's intriguing perspective on our treatment of planet earth.
The six shortlisted books
James by Percival Everett (Mantle)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape)
Held by Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Sceptre)
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges, says:
‘“I love the fact that a book can be like a living thing,” said one of the judges as we were choosing the shortlist for the Booker Prize. I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us. We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.
‘If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.
‘My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They have been carried everywhere – surely the necessary measure of a seriously good novel. Our final meeting to choose this shortlist together was punctuated by delight at them. They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them, novels that inspired us to write, to score music, and even – in my case – to go back to my wheel and make pots.’
The 2024 judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by 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 Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place on the evening of Tuesday 12 November at Old Billingsgate in London and will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row at 9.30pm. The ceremony will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes' YouTube and Instagram channels. The winner will receive £50,000, a trophy named Iris (after winner Iris Murdoch), and can expect their career to be transformed.
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