Women writers are now able to read mostly people's minds. We congratulate the women writers who have kept the reader's interest in books and writing still alive.

The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been released a little earlier. In the 55-year history of the legendary medal, only 5 out of 6 are women writers this time.

The first Australian writer in a decade and the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted are also on the list, which was culled from a longlist of thirteen.

The remaining six authors are American, Canadian, and British, and two of them have made the shortlist twice already.

One of the books featured is Orbital, by English novelist Samantha Harvey, which centres around six astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), with Harvey previously explaining: “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism.

“Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”

Harvey wrote a book about her insomnia, The Shapeless Unease: A Year Of Not Sleeping, which was published in 2020. She was also longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for The Wilderness.

Percival Everett was shortlisted in 2002 for The Trees (PA) (PA Archive)

The list includes two American writers: Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake and Percival Everett for James.

Everett was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 for The Trees, and he is again this year for James, a compelling reworking of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the viewpoint of the enslaved Jim.

The 2001 novel Erasure by Everett Everett was made into the film American Fiction, which starred Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown and won director Cord Jefferson the Oscar for best adapted screenplay earlier this year. Everett's Telephone was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2021.

Fellow American Kushner is shortlisted for Creation Lake, having previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018 for The Mars Room.

Kushner, whose other works include The Flamethrowers, said of Creation Lake: “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.

“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.”

With Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood becomes the first Australian writer to be shortlisted in ten years. The story revolves around a middle-aged woman who moves from Sydney to her childhood home, a small religious community in the middle of the outback. However, rather than finding peace and quiet, the town is visited by increasingly unsettling guests.

The Narrow Road To The Deep North, written by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan and set on the notoriously brutal Thailand-Burma railway, where his father was a prisoner of war, was awarded the 2014 Booker Prize.

Yael van der Wouden, a Dutch writer, is the first to appear on the Booker shortlist and has featured her debut novel, The Safekeep.

Additionally, her other work includes having written an online, David-Attenborough themed advice column, answering people’s problems posing as Sir David.

Canadian Anne Michaels, known for her poetry and 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, is shortlisted for Held, described on the official Booker Prize website as “a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds”.

This year’s judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins, The Guardian’s Fiction Editor Justine Jordan, and writer and professor Yiyun Li.

Musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney, who has collaborated with Sir Paul McCartney, Sting and Pink Floyd and won an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement award in 2017, is also on the judging panel.

The judges said of Michaels’ Held: “Starting with a wounded soldier on a French battlefield, this lyrical kaleidoscope of a novel is created from the scattered images and memories of four generations of a family.”

Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, said: “I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us. We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read.

“Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.”

He added: “The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices.

“The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.”

This year’s Booker Prize ceremony is being held on November 12, and the winning author will receive £50,000 and a trophy.

Last year’s winner was Irish author Paul Lynch and his Dystopian novel Prophet Song.