Wood longlisted for 2024 Booker Prize
Australian author Charlotte Wood has been longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Stone Yard Devotional (A&U).
The 13 books shortlist for the £50,000 (A$98,124) prize are:
- Creation Lake (Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Cape)
- Enlightenment (Sarah Perry, Jonathan Cape)
- Headshot (Rita Bullwinkel, Daunt Books)
- Held (Anne Michaels, Bloomsbury)
- James (Percival Everett, Mantle)
- My Friends (Hisham Matar, Viking)
- Orbital (Samantha Harvey, Vintage)
- Playground (Richard Powers, Hutchinson Heinemann)
- The Safekeep (Yael van der Wouden, Viking)
- Stone Yard Devotional (Charlotte Wood, A&U)
- This Strange Eventful History (Claire Messud, Fleet)
- Wandering Stars (Tommy Orange, Harvill Secker)
- Wild Houses (Colin Barrett, Jonathan Cape).
Wood is the first Australian writer to be longlisted since South African-born Australian author J M Coetzee was longlisted in 2016 for The Schooldays of Jesus (Text). The judging panel said of Stone Yard Devotional: ‘The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at [the protagonist’s] door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges.’
The longlist of 13 books was chosen from 156 books by a panel chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, with judges including novelist Sara Collins, Guardian UK fiction editor Justine Jordan, writer and professor Yiyun Li, and musician and producer Nitin Sawhney.
Said De Waal of the ‘glorious longlist of urgent, resonant books’: ‘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 US, 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.’
Category: Awards Local news
