The six-title shortlist has been released for the 2024 Booker Prize for Fiction. The finalists each receive £2,500 (about $3,300) and a bespoke bound edition of their book. The winner, who gets a further £50,000 (about $66,070) and a trophy named Iris (after winner Iris Murdoch), will be announced on November 12 during a prize ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. This year's shortlisted titles 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
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
For the first time in the Booker's 55-year history, the shortlist includes five women. The prize was last won by a woman in 2019, when it was shared by Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) and Margaret Atwood (The Testaments). Female writers have won 20 times since the Booker's inception in 1969.
"I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us," said chair of judges Edmund de Waal. "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."