The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2026 has been announced, featuring two previous winners, a previous shortlistee, and three authors new to the prize.
The shortlist of six books has been selected by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by celebrated classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard. Beard is joined by award-winning poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood.
The prize has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over 55 years, shaping the canon of 20th and 21st century English language literature. This year’s selection, which was chosen from ‘the Booker Dozen’ of 13 titles, selected from 163 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
The winning book will be announced on Monday, 9 November 2026 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner will receive £50,000, while the shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500.
The Booker Prize Shortlist 2026
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
John of John by Douglas Stuart
About the Shortlist
Spanning a range of genres – from dystopian fiction to contemporary realism, from campus satire to historical fiction – the shortlisted books explore what it means to be human in an ever-changing world and the communities and events that shape us. Both intimate and epic, personal and political, they provide meditations on familial bonds, identity, shame, love, loneliness, survival and the ultimate unknowability of others. They are moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful.
The interior lives of a rich cast of characters are vividly depicted by the shortlisted authors, from a beachcomber eking out an existence on the coast of Kent to an out-of-work actor paid to attend university lectures zipped inside a black leather bag for a psychology experiment; from a reluctant monarch in a medieval court under threat by scheming courtiers to a son returning home to his repressive father in a traditional Calvinist island community in the Outer Hebrides; from a teacher with a seemingly comfortable life in coastal Massachusetts who is harbouring a secret, to a survivor of a murderous homophobic attack in 1980s Kingston, Jamaica, set on retribution.
The shortlist features authors representing four countries: England, Scotland, Jamaica and the USA. The list includes previous Booker Prize winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart and three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout. Half of the judges’ selection features writers making their inaugural appearance on a Booker Prize shortlist.
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