It should be no surprise that many of the most creative, ambitious and far-reaching novels this year were written by women. For the first time in its 55-year history the Booker prize shortlist, announced this week, includes five female authors and only one man. Since its inception in 1969, the most prestigious award for a novel written in English has been won by 18 female writers (Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood have both won twice).
And yet it is a truth universally acknowledged that women both write and buy the majority of fiction. In 1996 the Women’s (initially known as the Orange) prize was created after there were no female authors shortlisted in 1991, and only one for the following four years. As its founder and director Kate Mosse pointed out, the problem wasn’t simply the absence of women, but that nobody seemed to notice. “It’s time for the Paulettes and Paulinas”, the novelist Sara Collins, one of this year’s Booker judges, joked, referring to the three Pauls – Paul Murray, Paul Harding and the winner, Paul Lynch – on last year’s male-dominated shortlist.
The 2024 panel were “surprised and thrilled” to discover that five of their choices were by women, because gender was not the most significant factor in the stories they had to tell. That this is a list based on literary excellence, not box-ticking, was the message.
There is no limit to the scope of these novels, which range from outer-space in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (the only British author on the list) to prehistoric underground caves in the American author Rachel Kushner’s cerebral spy-caper, Creation Lake. The climate emergency, the legacy of war, trauma and grief are some of the subjects addressed on a shortlist that includes the genre-defying Held by the Canadian poet and author Anne Michaels (famed for Fugitive Pieces), gay love-story-cum-thriller The Safekeep by the Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden, and Australian Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, about a middle-aged environmentalist who retreats into a convent.
These are urgent, outward-looking novels that wrestle with the biggest questions: where have we come from and where are we going? The same must be said of the lone male on the list. James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave Jim, by the acclaimed US writer Percival Everett, has been lauded by critics and long-tipped as the frontrunner for the prize.
While the number of female finalists is a cause for celebration, it doesn’t tell us anything new. Female novelists have dominated books pages, reading groups and prize lists in general for several years. What took the Booker so long? Indeed, the biggest recent publishing trend is a very female one: the Sally Rooney phenomenon and the ensuing glut of books about the lives and loves of young women.
Surprisingly for some, Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, published next week, was not even on the Booker longlist. But prizes and their shortlists reflect the tastes of their judges, and in an industry often accused of an obsession with youth and newness, one of the many joyful things about this selection is that it showcases female writers in their late 40s, 50s and into their 60s, as well as Van der Wouden, the youngest at 37 – and places their books alongside Everett’s career-defining James. Together, these remarkable novels make up the strongest Booker shortlist in some time.
