Largest number of female authors shortlisted in Booker Prize history

This year’s Booker Prize shortlist will feature five books by women, the biggest number of female writers in the prize’s 55-year history.

The list includes the first ever Dutch writer, Yael van der Wouden, as well as the first Australian author to be shortlisted in a decade, Charlotte Wood. However, the longlisted Mayo-born novelist Colin Barrett missed out on a nomination with his book Wild Houses.

Other shortlisted authors include Samantha Havrey, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and Anne Michaels.

Judging chair Edmund de Waal, an artist and author, said that while the shortlisted titles reveal the “fault lines of our times”, they are not “books about issues”.

One of the books featured is Orbital, by English novelist Samantha Harvey, which centres around six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) over the course of 24 hours.

Two American authors feature on the list - Percival Everett for James, a powerful retelling of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, and Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, which follows a spy tasked with infiltrating an eco-activist commune.

 

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Charlotte Wood is also shortlisted with Stone Yard Devotional, which follows a middle-aged woman who leaves Sydney for the small religious community in the middle of the Australian outback.

Dutch author Yael van der Wouden features with debut novel, The Safekeep, which looks at the treatment of Jews in postwar Netherlands through a family drama.

Canadian Anne Michaels, is shortlisted for Held, described on the official Booker Prize website as "a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds".

This year’s judging panel includes da Waal, novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney.

Judges said it was a “genuine surprise” to find that their list featured five women. “We came up with a shortlist, we sat back and looked at the pile and someone said ‘there are five women there’,” said Collins, adding that it was “such a gratifying, surprising, thrilling” moment.

The 2024 Booker prize winner will be announced on November 12.