Australia breaks eight-year Booker Prize drought

Charlotte Wood has been longlisted for the $98,000 Booker Prize with her acclaimed book Stone Yard Devotional, making her the first Australian nominee since J.M. Coetzee in 2016.

The novel traces a woman’s rejection of the modern world for a life of service, contemplation and devotion in an outback nunnery in NSW. Its deep themes about what truly matters in life and the search for meaning are universal and Wood’s brilliant, spare prose makes it a compelling read.

Charlotte Wood has been longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.Credit: Henry Simmons

The 59-year-old told this masthead she was very moved to hear the news.

“I am so happy that these judges could see that a so-called quiet book can also be an ambitious book and a book of depth with things to say,” Wood says. “Often the way we talk about books in public, we tend to talk about subject matter, we don’t tend to think about language and ideas.

“It’s so satisfying that people who don’t know anything about me can see what the book was trying to do.”

The author of seven novels, including The Natural Way of Things, which won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and international bestseller The Weekend, Wood has also written three non-fiction works, including The Luminous Solution, a book of essays on the creative process.

Writing in this masthead last year, Helen Elliott described Stone Yard Devotional as “daring because it looks at the obscure and therefore the difficult in the contemporary world”.

“Difficult and obscure, but also something that commonly underpins everything we do,” Elliott wrote. “In a plainer world, this was called the search for meaning when the concept called God is largely absent ... ”

Wood says this is the most personal book she’s written. Soon after finishing the first draft, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, as were her two sisters, all within the space of six weeks in 2022.

“It was like my life caught up with what the book was trying to do, in terms of looking at questions of mortality and what matters in our lives,” she says. “That was just circumstantial, but it certainly made me feel more committed to that idea of not trying to console or explain things too much.”

The Booker longlist is dominated by Americans including Tommy Orange – for Wandering Stars – the first Native American to feature. Yael van der Wouden – for debut novel Safekeep – is the first to make the cut from the Netherlands.

Also from the United States are Rita Bullwinkel (Headshot), Percival Everett (James), Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Richard Powers (Playground), along with Canadian-American Claire Messud (This Strange Eventful History), Canadian Anne Michaels (Held), Brits Samantha Harvey (Orbital) and Sarah Perry (Enlightenment), British/Libyan Hisham Matar (My Friends), and Irishman Colin Barrett (Wild Houses).

The shortlist will be announced on September 16.

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