Cooma-raised author Charlotte Wood makes Booker Prize shortlist

Charlotte Wood’s seventh fiction book, Stone Yard Devotional, has made the prestigious Booker Prize shortlist.

The Booker Prize is an annual award for the fiction book that the judges find to be the best sustained work written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.

Ms Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, published last year by Allen and Unwin, follows a woman who leaves her life behind and moves to an isolated religious community in the Monaro region of NSW.

In a statement, Ms Wood said she was “just so honoured” to have made the shortlist.

“I’m overjoyed that the Booker judges have included my novel on their shortlist for this year. Stone Yard Devotional is the most personal book I have ever written, and in large part it’s a tribute to my late mother, whom I loved so much,” she said.

“We hear a lot about bad mothers in contemporary fiction but not so much about good ones, possibly because they’re harder to make interesting on the page.

“I’m beyond grateful that this amazing group of judges – such seriously talented artists and thinkers – have seen fit to bring this global attention to my work, and in doing so have put real value on the type of novel that leaves ample space for a reader to enter, and invites that reader to sink into the work quietly and deeply.”

Stone Yard Devotional draws on Ms Wood’s own connections to the Monaro region – she grew up in Cooma, where her father worked for the Snowy Hydro Scheme.

After completing a cadetship at the Cooma Monaro Express, she studied journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst. Her first novel was published in 1999, when she was 34.

Cate Paterson, Publishing Director at Allen and Unwin said the publisher welcomed the announcement.

“Everyone at Allen & Unwin is so proud of Charlotte Wood’s outstanding achievement,” she said.

“We knew the magnificent Stone Yard Devotional deserved its place on the shortlist, but you can never predict these things. The whole company is celebrating.”

In August, Ms Wood became the first Australian to be included on the longlist since 2016. She is the first Australian to make the shortlist since Richard Flanagan took home the prize in 2014.

In their notes, the Booker Prize judges described it as a book that “reveals the vastness of human minds” while being set in a “claustrophobic environment”.

“Stone Yard Devotional is about one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world and her life when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms,” they said.

“Set in a monastery in rural Australia, the novel is a fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence.”

James by Percival Everett, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, Held by Anne Michaels and To Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden round out the shortlist.

This year also marks the first time in the Booker Prize’s history the shortlist includes five women and one man. The prize was last won by a woman in 2019, when Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments shared the award.

The shortlist is far from the first honour for the novel, with Stoneyard Devotional also being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction and literary fiction book of the year at the Australian Book Industry Awards and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize will be announced on 12 November at a ceremony in London.