The prestigious British literary prize will reveal the name of the winner of its 2024 edition on Tuesday, November 12.
The announcement will be made around 10 p.m. GMT at a ceremony in London, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Of the six finalists vying to succeed the Irishman, five are authors. A record for this prize which has contributed to the success of writers like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and the 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, who won it in 2016 with The vegetarian.
Faithful to its reputation as a talent scout, the Booker 2024 gives pride of place in its selection to names still little known to the general international public, including a first-time author under forty: Yael van der Wouden, with The Safekeephistorical fresco on the Nazi past of the Netherlands. She is also the first Dutch woman to reach the final. If she won this prize, she would follow in the footsteps of the Scotsman Douglas Stuart, awarded in 2020 with his first novel Shuggie Bainsince translated into 37 languages. At the same time, the final also offers big names in English literature. Among them, two favorites: the Americans Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner.
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A Booker after the Oscar?
After seeing the adaptation of his novel Erasure to make a place at the 2023 Oscars by winning the statuette for best screenplay, the African-American Percival Everett could well win the Booker with James. This prize had escaped him for the first time in 2022. A bit like Kamel Daoud, Goncourt 2024 prize who had published in 2013 with Meursault, counter-investigation a counterpoint to Albert Camus’ classic, The Stranger, James Everett revisits one of the masterpieces of American literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) the Mark Twain.
This time, the narration is from the point of view of Jim, a slave. One of the main plot threads is linguistic. In Twain, Jim’s dialect makes him a limited, somewhat pathetic character. In Everett, it is thought of as a survival tool that slaves use to hide their real abilities from white slavers. Upon its release in the United States, the book was called « masterpiece » by the New York Times. It was also favored by the British press, with the Times praising a rewrite « bright ».
Another story, another era: with Creation LakeRachel Kushner, 2018 Foreign Medici Prize with The Mars Clubtakes the reader into the world of espionage with the character Sadie Smith, who attempts to infiltrate a group of eco-activists in rural France. Canadian Anne Michaels, dubbed by her compatriot Margaret Atwood, could also win with Heldhis third novel. The author made a sensational entrance onto the literary scene in 1997 with Fugitive pieces (Memory on the run in French), a bestseller which had been praised by critics. In this new novel, the novelist explores the themes of her previous stories: history, memory, the effects of trauma and mourning over long periods, through the story of a man who tries to overcome the wound of the Great War.
The Australian Charlotte Wood will also try to win with Stone Yard Devotional. The story of an anonymous narrator, disillusioned with his work as a conservationist of endangered species, who decides to move into a convent. In Orbitalthe British Samantha Harvey follows six astronauts from the international space station (ISS).
The prize is a reward of 50,000 books (around 60,000 euros) and the promise of international fame synonymous with success in bookstores.
