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A diverse shortlist for this year’s Booker prize is united by one overarching theme: the urge to make sense of an increasingly fractured world. The six-strong list includes authors from across five different countries, and perspectives that range from a soldier on the battlefields of the first world war to that of an astronaut in orbit.
Edmund de Waal, chair of the 2024 panel of judges, said: “Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The faultlines 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 six authors are: Percival Everett (American) for James, a rewriting of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Samantha Harvey (British) for her cosmic meditation Orbital, Rachel Kushner (American) for her espionage thriller Creation Lake, Anne Michaels (Canadian) for Held, a family saga shaped by conflict, Yael van der Wouden (Dutch) for her debut novel The Safekeep, which evokes the Netherlands’ Nazi past, and Charlotte Wood (Australian) for Stone Yard Devotional, set in a convent in New South Wales.
This year’s shortlist, which has been whittled down from a longlist of 13 titles, includes five female authors, the largest number of women in the 55-year history of the Booker Prize. Percival Everett, the one male author on the list, is viewed by many in the literary world as the frontrunner. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on November 12 at a ceremony in London.
One decade on from a controversial change in rules, which expanded the prize beyond Britain, the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe to include fiction in English by writers from anywhere in the world, the debate around eligibility continues.
This year just one British author made the shortlist while Irish authors, who have recently been strongly represented, did not feature. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Long Island by Colm Tóibín, two of this year’s biggest titles, both by Irish authors, were conspicuously absent.
When asked about the decision and its ongoing impact, Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation replied: “Since the rule change the judges have been glad to be able to read stories from a truly global span of writers, regardless of the nationality of the author. This is the Olympics, not the Commonwealth Games.”
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