Skip to main content
Image of the Booker Prize Shortlist 2024.
View all events for category: Literature & poetry

Booker Prize Shortlist Readings 2024

Meet the six authors up for this year’s Booker Prize, as they read from and discuss their shortlisted books in conversation with Ellah Wakatama.

More details for Royal Festival Hall
This event has passed

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world, and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

It has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.

On the eve of the Booker Prize ceremony, hear from the six shortlisted authors in the running for this year’s £50,000 prize at this popular annual event.

This year’s longlisted books were described by Edmund de Waal, Chair of the Booker Prize 2024 judges, as ‘timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake’.

The list features blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic.

This year’s shortlisted books are:
James by Percival Everett, published by Mantle
Orbital by Samantha Harvey, published by Jonathan Cape
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, published by Jonathan Cape
Held by Anne Michaels, published by Bloomsbury Publishing
The Safekeep by Yael van de Wouden, published by Viking
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, published by Sceptre

Ellah Wakatama OBE is editor-at-large at Canongate Books and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She edited Africa39 (Bloomsbury, 2014) and the anthology Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic), and contributed to the anthology New Daughters of Africa (Myriad Editions, 2019). In 2011 she was awarded an OBE for services to the publishing industry, and in 2016 was named one of New African Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential Africans’.

Need to know

Age guidance
For ages 16+

Access

This event is British Sign Language interpreted (BSL) and Speech-to-Text transcribed (STT).

To book tickets for BSL interpretation, email [email protected] or call us on 020 3879 9555.

You can join our free Access Scheme through your online Southbank Centre account or via email.
Find out more about our Access Scheme
All our access information

For your visit

This event is held at the Royal Festival Hall Southbank Centre

The Royal Festival Hall is open six days a week.

Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 11pm
Monday, closed.

A concrete building with flags on the roof, with the London Eye and Big Ben in the background View larger image
A lively crowd cheers with raised hands, while a performer in a white hat and suit plays guitar, against red lighting. View larger image
A guitarist performing on a dark stage at the Royal Festival Hall, lit up by multiple spotlights. View larger image
Pianis Víkingur Ólafsson is seated at a grand piano while playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the stage of Royal Festival Hall View larger image
Organist Carol Williams plays the Royal Festival Hall organ whiich is illumiated with bold colours View larger image

Plan your visit

The Royal Festival Hall is home to our largest auditorium as well as The Clore Ballroom, National Poetry Library, Members’ Lounge, Festival Bar & Kitchen, Ballroom Cafe and Skylon restaurant.

Getting here

Our address is Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX.

The nearest tube stations to us are Waterloo and Embankment; Waterloo is also the nearest train station. And more than 20 different London bus routes pass within 500 metres of our venues.  More information on getting here by rail, road or river is available on our Getting here page.

We’re cash-free

Please note that we’re unable to accept cash payments across our venues.

Access

We’re working hard to remove barriers, so that our facilities and events can be accessible to as many people as possible.

All help points, toilets, performance and exhibition spaces at the Southbank Centre are accessible to all, as are the cafes, bars and restaurants. We also have excellent public transport links with step-free access. 

All information about booking wheelchair spaces, step-free access, blue badge parking, access maps and guides and other help available whilst you’re here, including details about our Access Scheme, can be found on our Access page.

Food & drink

On Level 2 of our Royal Festival Hall you can grab a slice of life by the Thames with drinks and freshly made pizza at our Festival Bar & Kitchen which opens out onto our Riverside Terrace. You can grab a coffee and a slice of freshly made cake from our Ballroom Cafe. Or alternatively enjoy destination dining in the restaurant at Skylon.

From coffee to cocktails, filling favourites to fine dining, plus some of London’s best street food – it’s all here at the Southbank Centre.

Other places to eat and drink whilst you’re here