Booker Prize Shortlist Readings 2024

The prestigious Booker Prize Shortlist Readings returns to the Royal Festival Hall.

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best-sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. On the eve of this year's Booker Prize ceremony, hear from the six shortlisted authors in the running for the £50,000 prize.

This year’s longlisted books were described by Edmund de Waal, Chair of the Booker Prize 2024 judges, as ‘timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake’. The list features blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic.

The six authors up for this year’s award will take to the stage to perform readings and discuss their shortlisted books, in conversation with Ellah Wakatama Allfrey.

This year's shortlist nominees are:

• James - Percival Everett (US)
• Orbital - Samantha Harvey (UK)
• Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner (US)
• Held - Anne Michaels (Canada)
• The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands)
• Stone Yard Devotion - Charlotte Wood (Australia)