The Longlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been announced today, featuring three debut novels and six previously nominated writers.

The longlist of thirteen books – the ‘Booker Dozen’ as it has come to be known – has been chosen by the 2024 judging panel chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal

It features blackly comic page-turners, multi-generational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic. The judges selection was made from 156 books published between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024. The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

The Full 2024 Longlist:

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

Held by Anne Michaels

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

Playground by Richard Powers

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

James by Percival Everett

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

My Friends by Hisham Matar

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

The judges’ selection includes: 

  • Strong new voices – including three debut novels – alongside international bestselling authors and six writers previously nominated for the prize
  • The first Dutch and first Native American authors to be longlisted, the first Australian in eight years, one British-Libyan writer, and authors from Canada, the UK, Ireland and the US 
  • A strong showing of Americans displays a range of experience, from a first-time novelist to the author of more than 20 novels
  • Blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic
  • Eight women and five men 

Edmund de Waal, Chair of the Booker Prize 2024 judges, says:

"After seven months and 156 novels it is a great moment to be able to hand over this glorious longlist of urgent, resonant books for the Booker Prize 2024: a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices.

One of the true markers of the novels that we have chosen is that we feel they are necessary books, fiction that has made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others. To reach the end of a novel and to be deeply moved and be unable to work out quite how that has happened is a great gift.

This is timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake. Here are books that unfold with quietness and stealth, as well as books that are incendiary. There are books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return. Crossing borders and crossing generations we find ourselves in a boxing ring in the US, in a small Irish town, in a convent in Australia, deep underground in rural France. We have one book on the list exploring deep oceans, another navigating outer space, a third tracking a comet. These are not books “about issues”: they are works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments, their singularity in a world that can be indifferent or hostile. The precarity of lives runs through our longlist like quicksilver. 

But there is no single register here. We need fiction to do different things – to renew us, give solace, to take us away from ourselves and give us back to ourselves in an expanded and reconnected way. And, of course, to entertain us. We think our longlist does all of this and we hope you agree."

The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. The impact of the award is significant.

Last year’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, saw a 1500% increase in sales in the week following its win. Before its longlisting, the book’s publisher, Oneworld, had sold 4,000 copies in hardback. Over 100,000 hardback copies have now been sold in the UK. It reached number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK for hardback fiction. In Ireland, it stayed at number one across all books for several weeks after the win.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Monday, 16 September during an evening celebration in the Portico Rooms at Somerset House in London. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.

The announcement of the winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will take place at a ceremony and dinner held at Old Billingsgate in London on Tuesday, 12 November. The winning author will receive £50,000 and can expect international recognition and a significant uplift in global sales. 

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