The 2024 Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, with the largest number of women represented in its 55-year history.
Five of the six-strong shortlist are women, with authors from five countries represented, including the Netherlands for the first time.
The list includes former Women’s Prize winner Anne Michaels, American writer Percival Everett and British author Samantha Harvey
Each short-listed author receives £2,500 and the winner, announced on 12 November, will win £50,000.
The prestigious prize is open to works of fiction written in English by authors anywhere in the world and published in the UK or Ireland.
The shortlist in full:
- James – Percival Everett (US)
- Orbital – Samantha Harvey (UK)
- Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner (US)
- Held – Anne Michaels (Canada)
- The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands)
- Stone Yard Devotion – Charlotte Wood (Australia)
Two of the novelists, Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner, have previously been short-listed for the award.
Everett’s James is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written from the perspective of the runaway slave, Jim.
Kushner’s Creation Lake is a spy thriller which sees an American woman infiltrate a radical anarchist collective in rural France.
Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, praised the six novels shortlisted and said: “My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They have been carried everywhere – surely the necessary measure of a seriously good novel.”
He added that they are all “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.
“Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity.”
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, contemplates the world from a different viewpoint as her novel follows a team of astronauts in the International Space Station.
The shortlist of books features one debut novel – The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
The queer love story is set in post Nazi-era Netherlands and sees a lonely young woman’s life upended when she has a guest to stay at her country home.
Also exploring female friendships is Stone Yard Devotion.
Charlotte Woods’ novel is about a middle-aged woman who retreats from the world to a convent in New South Wales.
Woods said the story “grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community”.
It’s the first time in 10 years that an Australian novelist has made the short list.
Held, which is Anna Michaels’ third novel, is a family saga which explores the memories of four generations.
The judges praised its large themes “of the instability of the past and memory”.
One of the judges, novelist Sara Collins, spoke about the fact that five women had been recognised.
“It was a genuine surprise to us. We came up with the shortlist, we sat back and looked at the pile and someone said: ‘Ha, there are five women there’.”
She added: “These books rose to the top on merit – they are tremendous books but… it was such a gratifying, surprising, thrilling moment to realise.
“My experience as a writer is that publishing is… dominated at certain levels by women but the literary recognition… has still seemed to be reserved for men.”
They chose the final six from 13 long-listed titles – known as the Booker dozen – which were selected from 156 published between October 2023 and September 2024.
The judging panel is also made up of The Guardian’s fiction editor Justine Jordan, writer Yiyun Li and musician Nitin Sawhney.
Last year the Booker Prize was awarded to Ireland’s Paul Lynch for Prophet Song, a dystopian vision of Ireland in the grips of totalitarianism.