Who will win the Booker Prize in 2024?

Winning the Booker Prize is a specific kind of prestige. Founded on the principle of awarding the best original fiction in English, the award is the world’s most famous celebration of literary fiction. The winners are usually a finely crafted balance of high-minded ideas and beautiful prose in an accessible and compelling novel. Past winners include Salman Rushdie (for Midnight’s Children in 1981), Hilary Mantel (for Wolf Hall in 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012), Margaret Atwood (for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and The Testaments in 2019), Yann Martel (for Life of Pi in 2002) and Kazuo Ishiguro (for The Remains of the Day in 1989). 

The 2024 shortlist contains some books that hold the promise of those past explosive winners. Among them is a rare Australian, Charlotte Wood, for her stunning novel Stone Yard Devotional. She is the first Australian to be included since Richard Flanagan won the award in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Wood has a moderate chance of winning the big prize from the six shortlisted books. It has been universally praised, but it is an example of a work that balances the prestige of literary fiction with the accessibility of a recreational novel. 

One male author is included on this year’s shortlist, making 2024 a historic moment for the Booker Prize. More female authors are included than ever before. The shortlist also differs significantly from the six books chosen in 2023, which celebrated debut authors exclusively. 

“Here are the books we need you to read,” said Edmund de Waal, chair of the 2024 judges, on the announcement of the shortlist. “Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.

“If that sounds excessive,” de Waal continued, “it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here.”

Which of the Booker Prize shortlist should you read?

Despite de Waal’s insistence on urgency, most of the 2024 longlist was quiet and reflective. Meditative novels took up the majority of the inclusions this year, including Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional. Most of the longlist’s more plot-driven selections made it through to the shortlist, and it is these books that will please the greatest swathe of readers. 

These include Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which concerns an undercover agent infiltrating an eco-activist commune in rural France. James by Percival Everett, poised to be the US’s most significant title for 2024, is a fast-paced adventure story, retelling the story of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the character of Jim, as a slave on the run. 

The titles that are most likely to divide readers are those that are the least accessible. Orbital by Samantha Harvey explores the lives of astronauts as they orbit the Earth at the International Space Station. It’s a short book that feels more like a poem than a novel. There is no plot save for the existential meanderings of the space station, the inhabitants of which gaze down upon the Earth from a great distance.

Held by Anne Michaels is more successful at sustaining the reader’s attention, but it emphasises literary craft over compelling storytelling. Michaels trips across time through intergenerational trauma (a common theme among the longlist this year), contemplating memory, loss and family. It doesn’t add anything new to these perennial themes, but the craft is undeniable. 

This is what makes Stone Yard Devotional a compelling argument for the winner. Wood marries literary skill with page-turning ferocity, never sacrificing one for the other. An unnamed protagonist flees her metropolitan life to return to her hometown, taking up residence at a sheltered religious community. A mouse plague and a visitor from the narrator’s past provide enough plot to establish momentum, while Wood veers into anecdotes that contemplate good, evil and loss.

Ultimately, Everett’s James is the most likely to win, however. It is a book to be widely enjoyed, possessing all the wit, wisdom and rhythm of Mark Twain, while never flinching from its complex themes of race. It is the only shortlist novel that truly feels ‘urgent’, even though it channels the past. Everett uses Twain’s world to satirise code-switching, ‘passing’ and the inherent absurdity of racism. When violence and terror inevitably emerge, it leaves the reader breathless. Everett has also been included on the shortlist before (for The Trees in 2022). 2024 is likely his year.

Booker Prize shortlist embraces TikTok attention span

While the shortlist shares similarities in theme, character and tone, the emergence of one particular literary form is worth noting. Several of the books included in the long and short lists take the fragmented narrative to new extremes. This trend is enough to be highly noticeable: entire novels are set out in snapshots, a paragraph or a few lines at a time. 

Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is one such novel and the most skilful example, switching between present and past as a seamless stream of consciousness. Thankfully, the novel still regularly rests in more extended anecdotes. This isn’t true for other books on the long list, such as Headshot Rita Bullwinkel, which has the breathless energy of watching TikTok, constantly flicking between new ideas every few seconds. Held by Anne Michaels occasionally possesses this same restlessness.

For a reader attempting to cover the shortlist, it may be advisable to skip Held, and the philosophically dense Orbital, and replace them with some of the longlist that didn’t make the cut. Playground by Richard Powers, Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange and My Friends by Hisham Matar are all stunning, readable novels. Their exclusion from the shortlist is a surprise to some readers.

The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced in November. The favourite is James by Percival Everett, but Australian Charlotte Wood could cause an upset.