The Booker Prize has revealed its 2026 shortlist, with six novels in contention for the award that honors “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.”
Two previous Booker Prize winners are finalists for this year’s award. Marlon James, who won the award in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, is shortlisted this year for The Disappearers, which is also longlisted for the National Book Award. Douglas Stuart, the 2020 Booker winner for Shuggie Bain, is a finalist this year for John of John, a Kirkus Prize finalist.
Elizabeth Strout, previously a Booker finalist for My Name Is Lucy Barton and Oh William!, made this year’s shortlist for The Things We Never Say. Luke Kennard was shortlisted for Black Bag, along with M. John Harrison for The End of Everything and Rebecca Perry for May We Feed the King.
The judges for this year’s prize are writers Mary Beard, Raymond Antrobus, and Patricia Lockwood; journalist Rebecca Liu; and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker.
Beard, chair of the prize jury, said in a statement, “This is writing at its best. There’s plenty to enjoy, some blissful escapism and prose to die for (‘I just wish I could have written that’ kept going through my mind). But there is also plenty here to change the way we see the world, to surprise us and to challenge our certainties.”
The Booker Prize, which comes with a cash award of 50,000 British pounds (about $67,000), was established in 1969. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things, Anna Burns for Milkman, and David Szalay for Flesh.
The winner of this year’s award will be announced at a ceremony on Nov. 9 in London.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
