Canadian writer Anne Michaels shortlisted for 2024 Booker Prize

Canadian author Anne Michaels is among the six authors shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. 

The £50,000 (approx. $89,757 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K. 

Five of the six shortlisted authors are women — the largest number in the prize’s 55-year history.

Michaels is shortlisted 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.

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. 

“We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read,” wrote de Waal in a press statement. “And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.”

“If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices.

“The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.”

The complete shortlist is as follows: 

• James by Percival Everett
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
• Held by Anne Michaels
• 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 shortlisted writers will receive £2,500 (approx. $4,488 Cdn) and a specially bound copy of their book.

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.

With files from AP