Not only does this year’s Booker Prize shortlist include the highest number of female writers in its 55-year history, three of the six writers included happen to be Jewish.
Authors Rachel Kushner, Yael van der Wouden, and Anne Michaels are among five female writers shortlisted for the prestigious literary award for fiction, and each comes from a Jewish background.
Israeli-born author Van der Wouden, who lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands, impressed readers with her debut novel The Safekeep, earning the Jewish writer a spot on the shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024.
The novel takes place 15 years after the end of the Second World War in the Netherlands and follows the provincial life of a lonely young woman whose life is upended when her eldest brother brings his new girlfriend to the rural family home. Charting themes of desire, loneliness and home, the novel “navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way”, said the Booker Prize 2024 judges.
The SafeKeep, Israeli author Yael van der Wouden's debut novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 (Photo: Booker Prize)
Van der Wouden received a notable mention for her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, in The Best American Essays 2018, and has been published in The Jewish Book Council, The Sun Magazine, and Barrelhouse Magazine, among other literary journals.
Internationally bestselling author Kushner, whose father is of Jewish ancestry, has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice, longlisted for The Mars Room in 2018 and shortlisted this year for Creation Lake, a novel described by the judges as “a profound and irresistible page-turner about a spy-for-hire who infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in rural France”.
According to the Booker Prize, Kushner said of Creation Lake: “I had long wanted to tell a story about a group of young people who decamp from Paris to a rural outpost in France, where they are set on a collision course with the French state. At the same time, I became interested in prehistory, both what can be known about ancient people and what the longing to know actually is, a sense that we have taken a wrong turn, that our ancestors hid messages from us that we don’t know how to read. Why now? Every day is a better time than the day before to ask where we are going and where we have been.”
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 (Photo: Booker Prize)
The Los Angeles-based author also wrote the acclaimed essay collection The Hard Crowd and the internationally bestselling novels The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba.
Canadian novelist Anne Michaels made the shortlist for her book Held, a narrative beginning in 1917 as the protagonist John is overcome by memories while lying wounded on a battlefield near the River Escaut. The “brief kaleidoscopic novel” spans four generations through which Michaels covers themes of “war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection”, according to the Booker Prize judges.
“Her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind,” the judges said.
Held by Anne Michaels has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 (Photo: Booker Prize)
Michaels, the daughter of a Polish-Jewish father, was a poet before she became a novelist with the publication of her 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces. She has won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction, and has served as Toronto’s poet laureate.
Each short-listed author receives £2,500 and the winner will win £50,000.
This year’s Booker Prize ceremony is set for November 12, and the judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal. He is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins, musician and composer Nitin Sawhney, The Guardian's fiction editor Justine Jordan, and writer and professor Yiyun Li.
