Booker Prize 2026: the six shortlisted novels and what the judges said

Six novels remained in contention for the 2026 Booker Prize after the shortlist was announced on 22 September. The award, for a single work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, is worth £50,000 to the winner; each shortlisted author receives £2,500. The winning book is to be named on 9 November 2026 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.

The judges chose the six from a longlist of 13, itself drawn from 163 submissions. The panel is chaired by the classicist Mary Beard, with the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician Jarvis Cocker, the critic Rebecca Liu and the novelist and poet Patricia Lockwood. Beard said in the announcement that the novels “range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated”.

The shortlisted books, in the order given by the Booker Prize Foundation:

1. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail). A beachcomber ekes out an existence on the coast of Kent; Harrison said the art towns of the UK’s east coast provided the setting and current affairs the themes and the satire. The judges said it “can be read as a thriller, a mystery, a satire, a dystopia, a road novel, a work of realism”. Harrison, 81, is the author of 13 novels and would be the oldest winner in the prize’s history; the record is held by Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the 2019 award.

2. The Disappearers by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton). The story of a survivor of a murderous homophobic attack in 1980s Kingston, Jamaica, who is set on retribution. The judges called it “a Jamaican epic from one of the most impactful Caribbean novelists today”. James won the Booker in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings; this is his fifth novel.

3. Black Bag by Luke Kennard (John Murray). An out-of-work actor is paid by a psychology professor to attend university lectures zipped inside a black leather bag. Kennard said he came across the original 1960s black bag experiment by accident. The judges described “a wonderfully quirky campus novel” that combines “an absurd experiment with a moving story about human frailty, passion, confusion and identity”. Kennard is a poet whose collection Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward Prize in 2021.

4. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta). The only debut on the list moves between the present day and a medieval court, where a reluctant monarch is threatened by scheming courtiers. The judges called it “an affecting and lush jewel of a novel” that “unsettles the idea that there’s ever one universal historical truth”. Perry, 40, is a poet and a former international trampolinist; the book has already won the 2026 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.

5. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking). A teacher with a seemingly comfortable life in coastal Massachusetts is harbouring a secret. The judges said the novel “engages with the deeply divisive politics of present-day America, without itself becoming divisive”. It is the American author’s 11th novel and her second Booker shortlisting, after Oh William! in 2022.

6. John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador). A son returns to his father in a strict Calvinist community in the Outer Hebrides in the 1990s. The judges called it “a rich and moving novel” in which “small-town secrets and buried shame reverberate to surprising, devastating and even joyous effect”. Stuart won in 2020 with his debut, Shuggie Bain.

What the list shows

The authors represent four countries – England, Scotland, Jamaica and the United States – and range in age from 40 (Perry) to 81 (Harrison). Three of the six are on a Booker shortlist for the first time: Harrison, Kennard and Perry. With four men and two women, the foundation noted, this is only the second time in ten years that men have outnumbered women on the shortlist; the other was 2023.

If James or Stuart wins, he would become the fifth author to take the prize twice, after J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood. A win for Perry would make her the seventh debut novelist to do so, and the first since Stuart.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said in the announcement that despite the range of styles and subjects, “in all of these novels we find forms of isolation: relationships breaking down or withheld, people harbouring secrets or pain”.