Women dominate shortlist for this year's Booker Prize

The Booker Prize Shortlist was announced at Somerset House yesterday, with religion, climate change, and race among the key themes tackled by the selected titles.

- MAIRA BUTT

Judges had the arduous task of whittling down the 13 longlisted books, announced in July, to just six, and broke records in the process.

The prestigious literary award’s 2024 shortlist features the largest number of women in its 55-year history, with five women and one man represented.

Booker Prize judge Sara Collins said this year’s shortlist which features the most women in its 55-year history is a “wonderful, genuine surprise”.

Collins, who is best known for writing The Confessions Of Frannie Langton, said the “tremendous” nominated books written by the five women “rose to the top on merit”. She went on to say that publishing is “dominated at certain levels by women” but added that “literary recognition” is still largely “reserved for men”.

Collins’s fellow judge Justine Jordan, the Guardian’s fiction editor, went on to speak about TikTok’s influence on sales of the nominated books.

She said: “I think enthusiasm can be everywhere on every platform. We tweet about books, we write whole books about books, and I suspect if you go into TikTok, you will find these books, and you will find people, especially being moved by them.

Each of the six shortlisted authors receives a £2,500 prize and a bespoke bound edition of their book. They are also likely to enjoy a significant uptick in sales owing to the vast publicity surrounding the Booker Prize.

Common themes among this year’s selected titles are those which transport readers around the world, out of the Earth’s atmosphere, and across time.

Announcing the news at Somerset House, Edmund de Waal, chair of the 2024 judges, insisted that the books were not selected for the “issues” they tackled, though he did acknowledge that they all grappled with ideas of identity and the “fault lines of our times”.