The UK’s Booker Prize For Fiction: 2024 Longlist

Two titles on the Booker Prize longlist are from independent houses, and the 2024 list includes a Dutch and a Native American writer.

Image: Booker Prize Foundation, Tom Pilston

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

De Waal: ‘Urgent, Resonant Books’

Announced this morning (July 30) in London, the Booker Prize for Fiction includes three novelists’ debut publications, while six of the authors tapped have previously been nominated.  Debut novels have claimed the Booker Prize six times, among them The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and, most recently, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.

Among firsts on this year’s 13-title longlist are a Dutch writer and a Native American author. An Australian is on the list for the first time in eight years. In addition, here are a British-Libyan writer as well as authors from the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Between them, the 13 longlisted authors have written more than 100 books. Around 50 of those 100 have been written by Percival Everett, Richard Powers, and Anne Michaels.

Pan Macmillan’s imprint Mantle has its first nomination, while Penguin Random House UK’s Jonathan Cape is here with four nominations.

This selection was made from 156 books published between October 1 and September 30 of this year, all submitted, of course, by publishers.

“In international translation and publication rights sales, a total 33 deals now have been secured for last year’s Booker Prize winner, Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song.’ A number of publishers have also bought Lynch’s complete backlist.”Booker Prize market impact

The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland.

For our worldwide readership, the Booker Prize for Fiction is not to be confused, of course, with the International Booker Prize, which is focused on translation.

The winner of this, the primary award in the Booker Foundation’s work, receives £50,000 (US$63,809). Each of the six authors eventually shortlisted is to receive £2,500 (US$3,190) and a specially bound edition of her or his book.

This year’s panel of jurors comprises artist and author Edmund de Waal, the panel’s chair, who is joined by novelist Sara Collins; fiction editor of the Guardian Justine Jordan;  writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

A shortlist is anticipated on September 16 in an event at Somerset House’s Portico Rooms. A winner is anticipated on November 12 at Old Billingsgate. The winner receives £50,000 (US$64,189) and a trophy called the Iris, after the late Booker Prize winner Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), a piece designed by the late Jan Pieńkowski. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500 (US$3,209) and a specially bound copy of his or her book.

The Booker Prize for Fiction 2024 Longlist

One of the longlisted authors here, Sarah Perry’s name may ring a bell for many. Her earlier The Essex Serpent was made into Clio Barnard’s direction of a 2022 adaptation with Claire Danes, Tom Hiddleston, and Frank Dillane, a six-episode series from See-Saw Films and CAMA Asset Storage & Recycling, distributed by the streamer Apple TV+.

Here, Perry is longlisted for her Penguin Random House publication Enlightenment.

Wood: ‘ Joy, Entertainment, Emotion, and Solace’

The 2024 Booker Prize for Fiction jurors are, from left, Sara Collins; Edmund de Waal; Yiyun Li; Justine Jordan; and Nitin Sawhney. Image: Booker Prize Foundation, Tom Pilston

In an extended comment on the release today of the Booker’s longlist, de Waal, the jury chair, is quoted, saying, in part, “After seven months and 156 novels, it’s a great moment to be able to hand over this glorious longlist of urgent, resonant books for the Booker Prize 2024: a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices.

Edmund de Waal

“One of the true markers of the novels that we’ve chosen is that we feel they’re necessary books, fiction that has made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others. To reach the end of a novel and to be deeply moved and be unable to work out quite how that has happened is a great gift.

“This is timely and timeless fiction, in which there’s much at stake. 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. Crossing borders and crossing generations, we find ourselves in a boxing ring in the United States, in a small Irish town, in a convent in Australia, deep underground in rural France.

“We have one book on the list exploring deep oceans, another navigating outer space, a third tracking a comet. These are not books ‘about issues’: they’re 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. The precarity of lives runs through our longlist like quicksilver.

“But there is no single register here. We need fiction to do different things—to renew us, give solace, to take us away from ourselves and give us back to ourselves in an expanded and reconnected way. And, of course, to entertain us.”

Gaby Wood

And Booker Prize Foundation CEO Gaby Wood says, “‘his year’s Booker Prize judges are a wonderful group—perceptive readers and generous listeners, led with erudition, lightness, and warmth by Edmund de Waal. The fact that they’ve been so happy to keep returning to each other’s company to discuss what they’ve read has made the process unusually productive.

“There are a few books on this list that were revisited as a result of particular eloquence on the part of individual judges, and that strikes me as the very best aspect of the Booker judging process: judges show each other what they see, and the books shift on re-reading.

“This panel found joy, entertainment, emotion, and solace in many of the books submitted—which resulted not only in a superb selection of books for readers with a range of tastes, but also in their gratitude to more writers than they were in a position to reward. They wished their longlist could have been twice as long.”

 A Booker Win’s Impact

Much has been written in these pages, as Publishing Perspectives readers know, about the Booker Prize Foundation‘s leadership in providing unit-sales effects after its winners are announced.

Today’s announcement, for example, includes an update on how the 2023 winner, the Irish author Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song has fared in the market since its win.

The book is published by Juliet Mabey‘s Oneworld Publications, making it one of the two Booker-shortlisted titles last year released by an independent house. AOneworld has won the prize twice before, in consecutive years, with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings in 2015 and with Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.

• After being named the 2023 Booker winner, Prophet Song saw a 1,500-percent increase in sales in the week following its win.
• Before its longlisting, Oneworld had sold 4,000 copies in hardback. More than 100,000 hardback copies now have been sold in the United Kingdom. It reached No. 3 in the Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK for hardback fiction.
• Internationally, in Ireland—in which the novel is set—it stayed at No. 1 across all books for several weeks after the win.
• Oneworld has printed 170,000 export trade paperbacks, with exceptionally strong sales in Ireland, Australia, and India. Grove Press in the United States has sold more than 90,000 hardbacks and ebooks in North America. Translation rights deals increased from two before Prophet Song’s longlisting to 13 before its win.
• In international translation and publication rights sales, a total 33 deals now have been secured, with a number of publishers buying Lynch’s complete backlist, as well.

Paul Lynch

Professionals in the world book publishing industry look at those statistics and can immediately tell the value of a Booker Prize win. And that, of course, makes it clear how formidably viable this award regime is in terms of its ability to impact the market fortunes of its top honorees. And this makes it hard to understand why more award programs, particularly in the UK industry—the world epicenter of book and publishing award programs—have not followed suit and made the effort to demonstrate through such accountings as this just what their “golden sticker” on a dust jacket in a high-street bookstore can mean to publishers and authors, let alone to consumers exhausted by clamorous claims of importance by so many awards outfits.

Since Publishing Perspectives began reporting on this and proposing last year that the industry would benefit from more awards’ disclosures of such information, the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction have made commitments to gather and report on their own accolade’s market impact. Many more need to step up their game and commit to providing this information, rather than expecting the industry and its readership to assume that all award attention is of value in raising the visibility and sales viability of books.

Potential sponsors of book and publishing award programs may want to ask whether a program is willing to make public its market-sales impact as a criterion for support. An appearance of hiding such information doesn’t reflect well on an awards program, or on its sponsors.

More from Publishing Perspectives on the Booker Prize for Fiction is here. More on the International Booker Prize is here, more from Publishing Perspectives on both Booker Prize programs is here. And more from us on the international industry’s many book and publishing awards programs overall is here.