LONDON — With three weeks to go before this year's winner is named, the six novelists shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize span a post-apocalyptic English coastline, 1980s Kingston, a Massachusetts classroom and a crystal-embedded doorway into a psychology experiment gone strange.
Judges chaired by classicist Mary Beard narrowed a longlist of thirteen titles, itself drawn from 163 submitted novels, down to six finalists on September 22. The winner will be announced November 9 at a ceremony in London, with the author receiving £50,000 and the Booker trophy; each of the five runners-up takes home £2,500.
The shortlist, detailed by Business Day's rundown of the finalists, includes two former winners returning to the list: Marlon James, who won in 2015 for "A Brief History of Seven Killings," is shortlisted again for "The Disappearers," set in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988. Douglas Stuart, the 2020 winner for "Shuggie Bain," returns with "John of John," set on Scotland's Isle of Harris in the 1990s.
A debut among the veterans
Also shortlisted is M. John Harrison's "The End of Everything," a post-catastrophe mystery set on the Kent coast; at 81, Harrison would become the oldest Booker winner in the prize's history if he takes the trophy next month. Elizabeth Strout, shortlisted previously in 2022 for "Oh William!," returns with "The Things We Never Say," following a Massachusetts history teacher as the 2024 U.S. election approaches. Luke Kennard's "Black Bag" follows a London actor who takes a job locked inside a bag for a psychology study, and Rebecca Perry's "May We Feed the King" — the only debut novel on the list — reimagines the story of a long-forgotten monarch through the eyes of a museum curator.
Announcing the list, Beard said the six books ranged "from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic," a description that the finalists, taken together, do little to contradict. Her fellow judges on this year's panel include poet Raymond Antrobus, musician and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker, writer Rebecca Liu and poet Patricia Lockwood. Full longlist details, including the seven countries represented among the original thirteen novels — Scotland, England, Ireland, Turkey, the United States, Mexico and Jamaica — are laid out in Esquire's longlist breakdown.
First awarded in 1969, the Booker remains the most closely watched prize in English-language fiction, and shortlisting alone reliably drives a sales bump for the chosen titles in UK and Irish bookshops in the weeks before the ceremony. With publishers now repositioning the six finalists on front tables ahead of the November 9 announcement, booksellers are bracing for the annual scramble that follows whichever name Beard reads out at Old Billingsgate.
