Artist and author Edmund de Waal to chair Booker Prize 2024 as the prize opens for submissions from publishers.
Artist and author Edmund de Waal chairs the 2024 judging panel and is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian,Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney. They will be looking for the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.
UK and Irish publishers are now invited to visit thebookerprizes.com/submissions to read the 2024 rules and to?enter their books for the prize. Deadlines are staggered between January 29th and June 3rd, 2024.
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced in July 2024, with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced in November with the winner receiving £50,000, as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors. Internationally renowned, the prize transforms the winner’s career: both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership and can expect a dramatic increase in book sales.
‘Fiction expands us. Novels bring proximity to worlds and lives and voices that we may not have been aware of, taking us from what we know into what we can only imagine. They renew language, change the shape of storytelling and above everything else bring deep and enduring pleasure. The great ambition of the Booker Prize is to explore contemporary fiction without preconceptions, and I am so privileged to be sharing my year of reading with such a gloriously distinguished and vigorous group of fellow explorers. I am looking forward to being part of the best book club ever.’
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the Booker Prize 2024 judges,
This year’s judges are perceptive readers, creative thinkers, seasoned collaborators. All of them are writers, but between them they also have backgrounds in science, law, music and art. Their lived experience spans the globe. Their Chair, Edmund de Waal, is deeply respected the world over for his ability to put people, books and works of art in conversation with one another. If the purpose of literature is, in part, to bridge a gap – to allow us to see the world from another point of view and to draw people together – then the 2024 panel couldn’t be better equipped to recommend works to readers that will get them thinking and talking. I’m hugely looking forward to hearing this group’s discussions as they discover great writing over the coming year.
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation
About the judges
Edmund de Waal(Chair) is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels and for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes,which won the 2010 Costa Book Award for Biography and the 2011 Ondaatje Prize. It has been translated into over 30 languages and in 2016 was awarded Book of the Decade by the Independent Booksellers Association. De Waal was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction in 2015, the year he published The White Road. In 2021, when he published Letters to Camondo, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. His art publications include texts by a number of Booker Prize authors, including the late A.S. Byatt, Colm Toíbín, Peter Carey and Elif Shafak.
Born in Nottingham, de Waal apprenticed with the renowned potter Geoffrey Whiting from 1981 to 1983, and went on to study English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1986.
De Waal’s interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum and the V&A Museum in London; Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The Frick Collection, New York and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
He has collaborated with a number of poets, performers, musicians and other visual artists, including the photographer Sally Mann and the choreographer Wayne McGregor. His library of exile, a pavilion originally exhibited within the Ateneo Veneto during the 2019 Venice Biennale, brought together two thousand books, most in translation, by exiled writers from Ovid’s time to the present day. The project travelled to Dresden, Germany and then to the British Museum. In 2021 the books were donated to the University of Mosul library in Iraq, which was destroyed in 2015.
Sara Collins is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019, became a Times bestseller, was translated into more than 15 languages and was broadcast as a four-part television drama on ITV in December 2022.
Sara studied law at the London School of Economics before qualifying as a barrister in 1994. She worked as a lawyer for 17 years before obtaining a Master’s degree in creative writing with distinction from Cambridge University in 2016, where she was the recipient of the Michael Holroyd Prize.
Sara is also a literary critic, screenwriter and broadcaster. She has been a frequent contributor and guest host on BBC Radio 4 and is a co-host of the Graham Norton Book Club Podcast on Audible.
Justine Jordan has been Fiction Editor at the Guardian for two decades. She has commissioned reviews and interviewed writers including Raymond Briggs, Susanna Clarke, Jon McGregor, Sebastian Barry and China Mieville.
She was born in London and grew up in Bristol. She studied English at Cambridge and Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin. She won the Vogue writing competition and then joined the Guardian website in its early days as night editor, going on to set up the books website.
Her criticism has featured in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the London Review of Books. She is a member of the Writers’ Prize academy, and her previous judging experience includes the Guardian First Book Prize, the 4thWrite Short Story Prize and the Costa Novel Award.
Yiyun Li is the author of 11 books, including Wednesday’s Child, The Book of Gooseand Where Reasons End. Her novels and short stories have been translated into more than 20 languages. Li’s honours and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the GuardianFirst Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and others.
Trained as a scientist, she is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a 2023 International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Harper’s, among other publications. She is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing programme at the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Nitin Sawhney is a world-class producer, songwriter, touring artist, club DJ, multi-instrumentalist and composer for theatre, dance, videogames and orchestras. He has recorded multiple albums and over 70 film and TV scores, which include adaptations of the 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and The Namesake by Booker-shortlisted novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Human Planet, What’s Love Got To Do With It and a current project for Disney.
The recipient of the Ivor Novello 2017 Lifetime Achievement award, he has collaborated with other world-class artists of all kinds. He has had his own BBC Radio 2 series and appeared on Desert Island Discs. He holds eight honorary doctorates from UK universities and sits on the boards of multiple charities, including Complicité. For the last four years he has been the Chair of the PRS Foundation, the UK’s funding body for new music and talent development, as well as being a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts and the Grammy Awards. A regular cultural and political commentator, he has written articles for all the major UK broadsheets and is due to release an anthology of his written work next year. His latest album, ‘IDENTITY’, for Warner Music, was released in October 2023. He was made CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours.
The impact of the prize
The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. The impact of the award is significant. In the week following Paul Lynch’s 2023 win for Prophet Song, the novel was described as ‘a prophetic masterpiece’ by the Washington Post and ‘a crucial book for our current times’ by the Guardian and saw UK sales increase by 1,630%. Prior to being longlisted for the Booker Prize, international rights to Prophet Song had been sold in two territories. Two weeks after its win, rights had been sold across 18 countries. UK publisher Oneworld has already printed more than 190K copies since its win, and the book hit number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list for hardback fiction for the second week running this week and was No. 1 across all books in Ireland for the two weeks since its win.
