The Booker Prize Foundation has announced the judging panel for the 2024 Prize, which includes Director and Professor of Creative Writing Yiyun Li, a world-renowned fiction writer and author of the recent bestselling story collection Wednesday’s Child.

“This year’s judges are perceptive readers, creative thinkers, seasoned collaborators. All of them are writers, but between them they also have backgrounds in science, law, music and art. Their lived experience spans the globe.”
— Gaby Wood, Booker Prize Foundation

First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world and brings recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction. The Prize annually recognizes long-form fiction written in English that has been published in the UK or Ireland over the previous year. The internationally renowned award has significant impact for the shortlisted and winning authors, including expanded global readership and increased book sales.

On the 2024 judging panel, Li joins novelist Sara Collins, the Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, musician and producer Nitin Sawhney, and artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who chairs the panel.

In announcing the judges, Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said, “This year’s judges are perceptive readers, creative thinkers, seasoned collaborators. All of them are writers, but between them they also have backgrounds in science, law, music and art. Their lived experience spans the globe…If the purpose of literature is, in part, to bridge a gap – to allow us to see the world from another point of view and to draw people together – then the 2024 panel couldn’t be better equipped to recommend works to readers that will get them thinking and talking.”

Award-winning writer Yiyun Li, new director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. Photo ©Basso CANNARSA/Opale

The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced in July 2024, with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced in November. The prize winner receives £50,000, and £2,500 is awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.

Li is the author of 11 books, including The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End. Her novels and short stories have been translated into more than 20 languages. Li’s honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and others. Trained as a scientist, she is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she was recently named a 2023 International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Harper’s, among other publications.