Anne Michaels (Marzena Pogorzaly)

Canadian novelist Anne Michaels has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

The shortlist for this year’s £50,000 prize (worth about $88,000 Canadian) was announced on Sept. 16.

Michaels is one of five women and six authors shortlisted for this year’s prize. She was nominated for her novel Held, published earlier this year by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Bloomsbury Publishing in the U.K.

“There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel,” the jury said in their citation. “Through broken stanza-like paragraphs and chapters that move between different members of the family across a century, Held achieves the feat of being deeply moving and asks the question ‘Who can say what happens when we are remembered?’ with tenderness.”

The jury for this year’s prize is comprised of artist and author Edmund de Waal; award-winning novelist Sara Collins; fiction editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer, and producer Nitin Sawhney.

Joining Michaels on the shortlist are American novelist Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, British author Samantha Harvey for Orbital, American novelist Percival Everett for James, Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep, and Australian writer Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.

Michaels was one of two Canadians to make this year’s 13-book Booker longlist – Claire Messud, who lives in Massachusetts, was longlisted for her novel This Strange Eventful History.

Michaels previously won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize in the U.K. for her first novel, Fugitive Pieces.

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize will be announced in London on Nov. 12.