In a welcoming move in the 55-year-long rich history of the prestigious Booker Prize formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969-2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002-2019), five out of the six authors shortlisted are women. The six shortlisted authors are from five different countries, including the Netherlands for the first time.

The shortlisted books are:

James - Percival Everett (USA)

Orbital - Samantha Harvey (UK)

Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner (USA)

Held - Anne Michaels (Canada)

The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands)

Stone Yard Devotional - Charlotte Wood (Australia)

It is worth mentioning that Percival Everett, the only male author on the list, was previously shortlisted for the award in 2022 for ‘The Tress’. Rachel Kushner was also shortlisted in 2018 for her third novel, ‘The Mars Room’. Yael van der Wouden, the first author from the Netherlands to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, received this recognition for her debut novel, ‘The Safekeep’.

Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges in the praise of the shortlisted novels said; "My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They have been carried everywhere – surely the necessary measure of a seriously good novel." He added, “They are all books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them, novels that inspired us to write, to score music. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity."

One of the judges, novelist Sara Collins, spoke about the fact that five women had been recognized. “It was a genuine surprise to us. We came up with the shortlist, we sat back and looked at the pile and someone said: ‘Ha, there are five women there’.” She added: “These books rose to the top on merit - they are tremendous books but… it was such a gratifying, surprising, thrilling moment to realize. My experience as a writer is that publishing is... dominated at certain levels by women but the literary recognition… has still seemed to be reserved for men."

The judging panel is also made up of The Guardian's fiction editor Justine Jordan, writer Yiyun Li, and musician Nitin Sawhney.

The winner will be announced in London on November 12, 2024, and receive a sum of £50,000. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book.