Women dominate 2024 Booker Prize shortlist

The 2024 Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, with the largest fig of women represented successful its 55-year history.

Five of the six-strong shortlist are women, with authors from 5 countries represented, including the Netherlands for the archetypal time.

The database includes erstwhile Women's Prize victor Anne Michaels, American writer Percival Everett and British writer Samantha Harvey

Each short-listed writer receives £2,500 and the winner, announced connected 12 November, volition triumph £50,000.

The prestigious prize is unfastened to works of fabrication written successful English by authors anyplace successful the satellite and published successful the UK oregon Ireland.

The shortlist successful 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, person antecedently been short-listed for the award.

Everett's James is simply a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written from the position of the runaway slave, Jim.

Kushner's Creation Lake is simply a spy thriller which sees an American pistillate infiltrate a extremist anarchist corporate successful agrarian France.

Edmund de Waal, seat of the judges, praised the six novels shortlisted and said: "My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They person been carried everyplace – surely the indispensable measurement of a earnestly bully novel."

He added that they are each "books that made america privation to support connected reading, to ringing up friends and archer them astir them, novels that inspired america to write, to people music.

"Here is storytelling successful which radical face the satellite successful each its instability and complexity."

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, contemplates the satellite from a antithetic viewpoint arsenic her caller follows a squad of astronauts successful the International Space Station.

The shortlist of books features 1 debut caller - The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.

The queer emotion communicative is acceptable successful station Nazi-era Netherlands and sees a lonely young woman's beingness upended erstwhile she has a impermanent to enactment astatine her state home.

Also exploring pistillate friendships is Stone Yard Devotion.

Charlotte Woods' caller is astir a middle-aged pistillate who retreats from the satellite to a convent successful New South Wales.

Woods said the communicative "grew from elements of my ain beingness and puerility merging with an wholly invented communicative astir an enclosed spiritual community".

It's the archetypal clip successful 10 years that an Australian novelist has made the abbreviated list.

Held, which is Anna Michaels' 3rd novel, is simply a household saga which explores the memories of 4 generations.

The judges praised its ample themes "of the instability of the past and memory".

One of the judges, novelist Sara Collins, spoke astir the information that 5 women had been recognised.

“It was a genuine astonishment to us. We came up with the shortlist, we sat backmost and looked astatine the heap and idiosyncratic said: ‘Ha, determination are 5 women there’.”

She added: “These books roseate to the apical connected merit - they are tremendous books but… it was specified a gratifying, surprising, thrilling infinitesimal to realise.

“My acquisition arsenic a writer is that publishing is... dominated astatine definite levels by women but the literate recognition… has inactive seemed to beryllium reserved for men."

They chose the last six from 13 long-listed titles - known arsenic the Booker twelve - which were selected from 156 published betwixt October 2023 and September 2024.

The judging sheet is besides made up of The Guardian's fabrication exertion Justine Jordan, writer Yiyun Li and instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney.

Last twelvemonth the Booker Prize was awarded to Ireland's Paul Lynch for Prophet Song, a dystopian imaginativeness of Ireland successful the grips of totalitarianism.