Percival Everett, Hisham Matar and Sarah Perry are among the 13 novelists longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. The “Booker dozen” also features works by Richard Powers, Tommy Orange, Rachel Kushner and Anne Michaels.
This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices”, said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal.
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (Cape)
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Daunt)
James by Percival Everett (Mantle)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Cape)
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Cape)
My Friends by Hisham Matar (Viking)
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet)
Held by Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury)
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Harvill Secker)
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry (Cape)
Playground by Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann)
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Sceptre)
Everett was longlisted for James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The judging panel, which is made up Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li and musician Nitin Sawhney alongside de Waal, said Everett’s 24th novel “stands as a towering achievement”. James “confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation”, they added.
Everett is one of six Americans on this year’s longlist. Orange, who is the first Native American to be nominated, has been selected for his second novel, Wandering Stars, a multigenerational saga exploring addiction, displacement, trauma and identity.
Powers was longlisted for his novel Playground, out in September, partly set on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia where residents prepare to vote on a proposal to send floating cities out into the open sea. Meanwhile, another forthcoming title, Kushner’s Creation Lake, follows an American woman sent to remote France to infiltrate an activist commune.
Three British novelists made the longlist of 13: Matar, Perry and Samantha Harvey. Perry’s fourth novel, Enlightenment, is a “long and quiet book” that “brings together a compression of place – a small town in 1990s Essex – and an exhilarating exploration of the heavens, comets, faith, ghosts, love,” said the judges. Harvey was longlisted for Orbital, which follows a day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
British-Libyan author Matar’s novel My Friends is about three friends living in political exile and centres on a real-life event from 1984, when gunmen opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London.
The longlist contains “timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake,” said De Waal. “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.”
Michaels, whose 1997 novel Fugitive Pieces won the Guardian fiction award, was longlisted for Held, a novel that “transported” every member of the judging panel. Michaels writes “about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time”, the judges said.
Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot – a story of eight female teenage boxers told over a two-day championship – was one of three debuts that made the list. Yael van der Wouden, who is the first Dutch author to be longlisted for the Booker, was put forward for The Safekeep, while Irish writer Colin Barrett was nominated for Wild Houses.
Completing the longlist are This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, who previously made the list in 2006, and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, the first Australian to be longlisted in eight years.
The longlisted titles are not “books ‘about issues’,” said De Waal. “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.”
This year’s Booker prize was open to works published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. When the prize was first awarded in 1969, it was open to Commonwealth writers, but from 2014 onward, writers of any nationality were allowed to be entered. Books must be written originally in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland to be eligible.
The shortlist for the £50,000 prize will be revealed on 16 September, and the winner will be announced on 12 November. Recent recipients include Douglas Stuart, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and the 2019 co-winners Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood. Last year, Paul Lynch won the prize for his novel Prophet Song.
Earlier this year, Radio 1Xtra host Richie Brave urged the Booker prize to consider changing its name because of its links to enslavement. Brave’s ancestors were enslaved by the founders of the company that originally sponsored the prize.
To explore all the books on the Booker prize 2024 longlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
