Rachel Kushner ’01 Advances to 2024 Booker Prize Shortlist

Update: 

Writing alum Rachel Kushner ’01 was officially confirmed to the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist on Monday, for her novel Creation Lake. The announcement follows Kushner being named to the award’s longlist in July.

“Novels that investigate what it is to be human can veer into the sentimental; this one is utterly flinty and hard-nosed. And yet, there’s mystery at its core—both the mystery of human origins and of individual identity,” said the judges in a statement.

The shortlist is composed of six titles representing the best in fiction in the English language. Founded in 1969, this year marks the first time in the prize’s history that five of the six shortlisted authors are women.  

It’s Kushner’s second time making the shortlist, having previously been selected in 2018 for her novel, The Mars Room.

All six shortlisters receive £2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London’s Old Billingsgate on November 12.

Only last week Kushner’s Creation Lake was also named to the longlist for the National Book Award. Finalists for that prize will be announced on October 1.

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Original: August 30, 2024

Writing alumna Rachel Kushner ’01 has been made the 2024 Booker Prize longlist for her novel Creation Lake. The long list of the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the literary world, features 13 diverse works selected from 156 submissions. The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 16 at Somerset House in London, with each shortlisted author receiving £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner, who will be announced on November 12, will receive a £50,000 prize.

Creation Lake follows Sadie Smith, a 34-year-old American undercover agent known for her ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty. She is dispatched by her mysterious yet powerful employers to a remote corner of France with a mission to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists led by the charismatic Bruno Lacombe. The novel has been described as part spy thriller, part profound treatise on human history, where a woman finds herself caught in the crossfire between the past and the future.

“I had long wanted to tell a story about a group of young people who decamp from Paris to a rural outpost in France, where they are set on a collision course with the French state,” Kushner said in an interview. “At the same time, I became interested in prehistory—both what can be known about ancient people and what the longing to know actually is, a sense that we have taken a wrong turn, that our ancestors hid messages from us that we don’t know how to read. Why now? Every day is a better time than the day before to ask where we are going and where we have been.”

The 2024 judging panel, chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, selected the longlist. The panel also includes award-winning novelist Sara Collins, Fiction Editor of The Guardian Justine Jordan, world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li, and musician, composer, and producer Nitin Sawhney. 

She has also been nominated for the Booker Prize for The Mars Room in 2018. Kushner is the author of The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles.