If you struggle to keep abreast of notable new novels, it can be helpful to check the consult a list of winners of recent literary awards. The juries of major prizes often wade through dozens or even hundreds of submissions when they put together their shortlists, and are therefore well placed to offer informed recommendations. Here, we've put together an easy to consult round-up of novels that won big literary awards in 2024.
I like to keep a tab on newly released books—see my recent round-up of notable novels of autumn/fall 2024, summer 2024, and spring 2024—but truly it is an impossible task for one person to stay fully up-to-date on all that is being published. I’m painfully aware, also, that any list compiled by myself must inevitably be coloured by my own biases, preferences, and ignorances. So, in an attempt to offer a more rigorous overview of the best novels of 2024, here is a concise rundown of the books that won big at the major fiction awards in 2024.
British and Irish literary awards
The Booker Prize is the most obvious place to start. It is one of the most prestigious fiction prizes in the Anglophone world, given its wide remit and huge public profile. To qualify, a book must have been written in English and published in the UK and Ireland over the previous 12 months. This year, Samantha Harvey won the £50,000 prize for her dreamy space station drama Orbital. I say ‘drama,’ but not a whole lot happens—however the writing is lush and beautiful, and the inner lives of and tension at play between the astronauts and all that they signify are more than enough to command your attention across this slim volume. The composer Nitin Sawhney, who served on this year’s jury, told me in an interview about the novels shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize that he had loved it so much that it had inspired him to write a piece of original music. The perfect soundtrack to read Orbital by! Find that online here.
A few months ago I also spoke to the novelist Monica Ali about the books shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, which this year was won by V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night. It’s set during Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war, and focuses on the female experience of conflict. “I mean, where to start?” asked Ali. “Once you’ve read this book, you’re never going to forget it. It’s absolutely searing, deeply moving. And it’s an utterly compelling piece of storytelling.”
Translated fiction doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, so let me also draw your attention to the winner of the International Booker Prize: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, an intense novel that centres upon a tumultuous affair between a university student and a married writer in his fifties in East Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. The broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, who chaired this year’s jury, described it to me in an interview as “an expertly written book about the entanglement of personal and national transformations” that “invites you to make the connection between these generation-defining political developments and this devastating, even brutal relationship, questioning the nature of destiny and agency.” Translated by Michael Hofmann.
In Ireland, the Dublin Literary Award—worth €100,000—was won by the Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu for his surrealist novel Solenoid, in which the fiction is interwoven with memoir and philsophical thought experiments. The judges’ statement described it as “wildly inventive, philosophical, and lyrical, with passages of great beauty,” noting that the translation by Sean Cotter captures “the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership.”
North American literary awards
Jayne Anne Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Night Watch, a mother-daughter story set in a West Virginia asylum in the aftermath of the American Civil War. In it, a severely wounded Union veteran, a young girl and her traumatised mother struggle to process all that they have experienced. The judges praised it as a “beautifully rendered” novel. Ed Park’s counterfactual history of Korea, Same Bed, Different Dreams, and past Five Books interviewee Yiyun Li‘s “quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching” (FT) short story collection Wednesday’s Child were finalists.
Earlier in the year, Lorrie Moore triumphed in the fiction category at the National Book Critics Circle Awards for her latest novel I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home, a novel in which a grieving man embarks on a cross-country road trip with the decaying body of his dead lover. It has all the snappy humour and melancholy that we’ve come to expect from Moore. (Perhaps this gives gives me an excuse to direct you to her devastating and darkly witty 1997 story, set in a children’s hospital, ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’?) Generally, the National Book Critics Circle Awards shortlists serve as a kind of bellwether of American critical opinion, and are therefore an excellent source of reading tips.
Percival Everett was the very worthy winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction for James, his reimagining of Huckleberry Finn. It was also shortlisted for (in fact, was the favourite to win) this year’s Booker Prize, and in the fiction category at the Orwell Prize. Lara Choksey, one of the Orwell Prize judges, said: “Twain’s tale of friendship on the run is converted into a larger history of collective freedom won through close encounters with the great American outdoors and its jealous, violent gatekeepers.”
This year’s winner of Canada’s Giller Prize for Fiction was Anne Michael’s Held, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Booker judge Sawhney (see above) described it as a very complex, layered book which is “about questioning the nature of existence, and different concepts around consciousness, perception, the nature of reality.” It was, he added, “very interesting because it comes in at so many different ideas from so many different angles.” It’s not a light read, but it is one that will reward your efforts—from the author of the highly acclaimed Fugitive Pieces.
Australian and New Zealand literary prizes
I was excited to see Alexis Wright win the Miles Franklin Award for a second time, with her latest book Praiseworthy. It is, as we have come to expect of Wright’s work, a book of epic proportions and awesome ambition. Praiseworthy is a nonlinear narrative set in an Aboriginal community in the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is beset by a mysterious brown haze—a physical manifestation of all that has gone wrong in this troubled town. It is, declared Astrid Edwards in The TLS, “not only a satire. It is also an allegory and a tragedy, ambitious in scope and execution, a dirge for all things and beings – people, animals, the past and the future – that have been, and will be, lost.” Like Anne Michael’s Held, this isn’t exactly a light beach read, but a book to embark upon, embrace, immerse oneself in.
At the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Emily Perkins won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for her novel Lioness, in which a wealthy woman finds her family embroiled in a corruption scandal, and is forced to evolve from “catalogue model blandness” to the predator of the title. It’s a story of female rage and a sudden unravelling.
The Nobel Prize for Literature
South Korean novelist and poet Han Kang was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The ceremony took place earlier this month, shortly after a brief declaration of martial law in her country; she appeared to address the political tumult at home in her speech, declaring that “the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life.” Kang’s 2014 novel Human Acts focuses on violent clashes between protestors and the military during an earlier period of martial law four decades previously. In a press conference after the ceremony, she said it had been “startling” to see similar events unfolding in real time.
Historical fiction
The winner of the 2024 Walter Scott Prize was Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts, set towards the end of colonial rule in Trinidad. When I spoke to Katharine Grant, one of the judges, earlier this year, she said it could be “a tough read, not for toughness’s sake, but because life was tough, sometimes more than tough as we learn from the backstories of the characters.” But, she added, “Kevin Jared Hosein writes with such energy, such command of his plot, such confidence, that you don’t want to look away in case you miss something. You feel the desires of the people he’s created; you can see where they might lead. You feel for them all.” Read our full coverage of the 2024 shortlist here.
Of course, there are far more prizes than I have space to summarize here. Some very prestigious! Have we unfairly missed one of your reading highlights of the year? Let us know on social media.
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Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here. Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here.
Cal Flyn is a writer, journalist, and the deputy editor of Five Books. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, her nonfiction book about how nature rebounds in abandoned places, was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She writes regular round-ups of the most notable new fiction, which can be found here. Her Five Books interviews with other authors are here.
