Booker 2024 shortlist a historical moment

Five of the six authors in the 2024 shortlist for Booker Prize, announced on Tuesday, are women. This is a first in the 55 years of the Booker. The themes in these books encompass queer romance, thriller fiction, collective memory, and perspective shift, among other things. Clearly, the world has come a long way from when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she described the life of William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith, a gifted but discouraged writer who eventually kills herself.

The shortlist is a historical moment of empowerment, but one that is purely coincidental. Novelist Sara Collins, one of the jurors, has spoken about this moment and said that the six novels made it to the top due to “pure merit” but the realisation that five of them were written by women felt “gratifying, thrilling”. Indeed, this is a milestone moment in the centuries-long struggle of women to find literary representation in a man’s domain. For years, women wrote under pseudonyms — indicating the urge to express themselves over the pursuit of fame. The themes stressed the liberation of suppressed and repressed emotions as was the case with the character of Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss (1860), written by Victorian author Mary Ann Evans who took the name George Eliot to ensure that her work was “taken seriously”.

Today, it is hard to imagine a world where women did not write. Think of a library without Toni Morrison, Ismat Chughtai, or Margaret Atwood and the infinite universes these writers have allowed us to imagine. When we think of the feminist movement as empowering women writers, let us not forget the travails of authors such as Evans and Woolf whose courage enabled a million Judiths to speak their truths.