The 2024 longlist for the Booker Prize, the world’s most influential prize for a single work of fiction, has been announced.
Featuring 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, the ‘Booker Dozen’ of 13 titles that make up the longlist for the 2024 prize are described by Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges as a group of “timely and timeless fiction… that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return.”
The longlist
- Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
- Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
- James by Percival Everett
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
- My Friends by Hisham Matar
- Held by Anne Michaels
- This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
- Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
- Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
- Playground by Richard Powers
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
- Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The judges
The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by the 2024 judging panel. The 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.
Edmund de Waal, Booker Prize 2024 Chair of 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. 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.
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 shortlist and winner announcements
The six books shortlisted for this year’s prize will be announced on Monday, 16 September at an evening event 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 2024 winner will be announced on Tuesday, 12 November at ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner receives £50,000 and a trophy, named Iris after Booker Prize winner Iris Murdoch, and designed by the late Jan Pieńkowski.
For more information, visit the Booker Prizes website.
The Booker Prize 2024 Reading Challenge
To coincide with the longlist, the prize is running a Reading Challenge to encourage readers to explore the titles on the 2024 longlist, share their thoughts, and connect with readers from around the world.
Librarians can sign up for free physical and digital POS to celebrate the Booker Prize longlist and Reading Challenge in your library, and a chance to win a trip to the Booker Prize ceremony in London.
Physical POS will include posters featuring this year’s longlist and postcards to help your library users track and share their progress. The materials will guide them to further downloadable online Reading Challenge resources including a reading chart and social media templates.
The offer for physical POS is now over, but you can still purchase a longlist digital pack from our shop.
Get involved
If you work in a library or workplace and would like to promote the longlist, you can download a free digital pack from our shop.
What do you think of the 2024 longlisted titles? Which have you read and what will be added to your TBR pile? Add your comments below, or click any title above to leave a review.
Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using #BookerPrize2024.
Keep up with all the latest news on the Booker Prizes website.
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