Irish author named on 2024 Booker Prize longlist for his debut novel

His novella Calm with Horses was adapted into the 2019 award-winning film starring Barry Keoghan

Wild Houses is just one of three debut novels on the influential list

Irish-Canadian author Colin Barrett has been named on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist for his debut novel, Wild Houses.

Barrett was described by the panel as “well established as a master both of the short story and the sentence; his debut novel confirms and extends all his promise”.

His short story collection Young Skins was highly acclaimed, with one of its stories, Calm with Horses, being adapted in 2019 to an award-winning film starring Barry Keoghan, Cosmo Jarvis, David Wilmot and Hazel Doupe.

A total of thirteen novels made the longlist, with Barrett the only Irish author among them, and includes the likes of “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”.

Wild Houses is just one of three debut novels on the influential list, alongside Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.

Booker Prize 2024 longlist

It centres around the town of Ballina, near where the author grew up and, as mentioned by the Booker Prize panelists, it is a “propulsive, darkly comic and superlatively written account of frustration and misadventure in a small Irish town”.

“Nicky is a self-reliant 17-year-old whose dreams of escape are slowly coming into focus when her hapless boyfriend Doll gets taken hostage by local goons over a drug debt; misfit Dev is reluctantly embroiled.

“The connections between the cast and the past tragedies that have forged them are expertly revealed in a slow-burn study of character and fate that’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Violence and farce mingle in a novel that feels as sharp, funny and bitingly bittersweet as life.” 

Other titles on the list include Orbital by Samantha Harvey; James by Percival Everett; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner; My Friends by Hisham Matar; Playground by Richard Powers; Enlightenment by Sarah Perry; Held by Anne Michaels; Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange; and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.

A shortlist of six books will be announced on Monday, September 16 while the overall 2024 winner will be announced on Tuesday, November 12 at a ceremony in London. The winner will receive £50,000 and a trophy.

Last year's Booker Prize was awarded to Irish author Paul Lynch for his dystopian novel Prophet Song.