The British author’s novel about astronauts on the International Space Station was chosen unanimously as the winner, says judging chair Edmund de Waal
Ella Creamer
Tuesday 12 November 2024
Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.
The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton)
Photograph: Patrick Bolger/
I started writing The Bee Sting at the end of 2017. I’d spent the previous 18 months working on a screenplay and I was aching to get back to the freedom and possibility of a novel. But for a long time I couldn’t decide what to write. I had three very different ideas and I started making notes for each one: blocking out scenes, tracing character arcs, all that. Looking back, I can see I was nervous about beginning something new after being away from fiction for so long, and trying to prove to myself that it would work. But notes don’t tell you anything about a novel’s voice, which is the most important thing about it, and which you won’t discover until you actually start to write.
Any conversation about what reflects the best of world literature necessarily becomes a referendum on what literature can and should do. As chair of judges for this year’s Booker prize, I think it’s safe to say the conversations between my fellow judges and I were never dull. Adjoa Andoh, Mary-Jean Chan, James Shapiro and Robert Webb and I spoke for hours to decide on our shortlist, always going overtime. What, we asked ourselves, made a book great? Was it extraordinary prose? An uncanny vision? Was it even something definable or some more ineffable quality?
Chetna Maroo’s ‘mesmerising’ Western Lane has been chosen on a male-dominated list
‘Portraits of what it means to be alive today’: how we chose the 2023 Booker prize shortlist
Ella Creamer
Thursday 21 September 2023
Just one novel by a British writer has made the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. The list is also weighted towards male writers for the first time in eight years.
Four of the six shortlist places went to novels by men: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Study for Obedience by the Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein completes the list. None of the six authors have been shortlisted for the prize before.
Previously nominated authors Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray join 13-strong field including four debuts
Ella Creamer
Tuesday 1 August 2023
A longlist of 13 “original and thrilling” books offering “startling portraits of the current” are in contention for the 2023 Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award.
The longlist features four debut novelists and six others who have been longlisted for the first time, alongside Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray, who have seven previous Booker nominations between them.
A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Canongate)
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Granta Books)
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (4th Estate)
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)
This Other Eden by Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Pearl by Siân Hughes (The Indigo Press)
All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Tinder Press)
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld)
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Picador)
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)
"If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song...a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere."
— Observer
Prophet Song imagines an Ireland under fascist control, breaking through the it-couldn’t-happen-here complacency of western societies
‘Soul-shattering’ Prophet Song by Paul Lynch wins 2023 Booker prize
Justin Jordan
W
The Irish author’s novel set in an imagined Dublin descending into far-right tyranny wins £50,000 prize
Paul Lynch’s timely Booker winner is a novel written to jolt the reader awake
Irish author Paul Lynch has won the 2023 Booker prize for his fifth novel Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny. It was described as a “soul-shattering and true” novel that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment” by the judging chair, Esi Edugyan.
Somerset Maugham appears as a flawed actor in a colonial morality play inspired by his classic short story
Xan Brooks
Thursday 11 May 2023
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The Proudlock scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, that pitiless chronicler of so much human frailty. It now provides the prompt for Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, an ambitious, elaborate fiction about fictions that beats back to the humid heyday of empire and instals the bestselling author as a flawed player in the drama. “We will be remembered through our stories,” Maugham declares at one point. He speaks with the bland self-assurance of a man who invariably writes the final draft.
The writer’s impressionistic second novel follows a pupil and teacher as they navigate the social codes of rural Ireland
Killian Fox
Sunday 23 April 2023
Jamie O’Neill stands apart from other kids his age in Emory, a fictional town in the west of Ireland. A lifelong reader of Edgar Allan Poe, he nevertheless favours the symmetries of mathematics over fiction, revering the work of the late Iranian Fields medallist Maryam Mirzakhani. On his first day at Christ’s College, the local all-boys secondary school, he knows exactly how many steps it will take him to walk there from home (2,816). And he wants to build a perpetual motion machine so that, by some complex logic that only he understands, he can reconnect with his mother who died giving birth to him.
