Canadian authors Anne Michaels and Claire Messud are among the 13 authors longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.
The £50,000 (approx. $84,882 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K.
Michaels is longlisted for her novel Held, which weaves together historical figures and events in a mysterious narrative that spans generations. It begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow unable to move or feel his legs.
When he returns home to North Yorkshire with life-changing injuries, he reopens his photography business in an effort to move on with his life. The past proves harder to escape than he once thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.
Michaels is a writer of poetry and fiction whose books have been translated into more than 45 languages and whose work has been adapted for the screen and the theatre. She is the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Q30:51Anne Michaels: Held, how she knows she’s finished writing a book, and the unexpected reason she’s so private
Anne Michaels is an award-winning Canadian poet and novelist who just published her long-awaited third novel, “Held.” The story spans 115 years and deals in themes familiar to her work: history, grief and the power of love. Anne tells Tom why it took nearly 15 years to write the novel, why she’s so interested in writing about war, and why she chooses to live an intensely private life.
Messud is longlisted for her novel This Strange Eventful History, which follows a French Algerian family over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010. The book tells the story of the Cassars as they are separated in the Second World War, flee Algeria after it declares independence and try to build their lives elsewhere, with the social and political upheaval of their recent past fresh in their minds.
As she grows up and wants to understand her family’s history, Chloe, convinces her parents and grandparents that sharing this part of them will bring them peace.
Messud is a Canadian American author with French Algerian roots. Her books include The Emperor’s Children, which was longlisted for the Booker in 2006, and When the World Was Steady and The Hunters, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has won Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Mass.
Writers and Company50:49Claire Messud on the stories and secrets of a French Algerian family in The Last Life
This week, American Canadian novelist Claire Messud. Throughout her career and in her new book, This Strange Eventful History, one of TIME’s most anticipated of 2024, Messud draws on her own family’s history, especially that of her French Algerian father. In 2001 she spoke with Eleanor about her novel The Last Life, which traces three generations of a French Algerian family from the perspective of a teenage girl. To conclude the program, Messud reads a chapter from the novel.
This year’s Booker Prize jury is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal. Rounding out the jury is novelist Sara Collins, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, writer and professor Yiyun Li and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
“One of the true markers of the novels that we have chosen is that we feel they are 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,” wrote de Waal in a press statement.
“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.”
The longlist was chosen from 156 books published between Oct. 1, 2023 and Sept. 30, 2024.
The complete list is as follows:
- Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
- Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
- James by Percival Everett
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
- My Friends by Hisham Matar
- This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
- Held by Anne Michaels
- Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
- Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
- Playground by Richard Powers
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
- Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Many of the shortlisted books are available in accessible formats on the Centre for Equitable Library Access website.
The six-book shortlist will be announced on Monday, Sept. 16. The shorlisted writers will receive £2,500 (approx. $4,441 Cdn) and a specially bound copy of their book.
Ahead of the shortlist announcement, the Booker Prizes are launching a Booker Prize Book Club for readers around the world to explore the list together.
The 2024 winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Tuesday, Nov. 12 at a ceremony in London.
Since 2013, authors from any nationality have been eligible for the Booker Prize. Past Canadian winners include Margaret Atwood, who shared the 2019 prize with British novelist Bernardine Evaristo. Atwood was recognized for her novel The Testaments, and Evaristo for her novel Girl, Woman, Other. They split the prize money evenly.
Two other Canadians have won the prize since its inception in 1969: Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient and Yann Martel in 2002 for Life of Pi.
Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for Prophet Song.