Two former winners and a past finalist are among the six writers on the shortlist for the 2026 Booker Prize, announced in London on September 22. The six novels range from a post-apocalyptic English coastline to 1980s Kingston and a remote Scottish island.
“This is writing at its best,” said the classicist Mary Beard, who chairs this year’s judges. She is joined on the panel by poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, critic Rebecca Liu and novelist Patricia Lockwood.
The six shortlisted novels
- The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (UK). A beachcomber who makes a living selling what washes up on a ruined English coast finds something he must keep hidden. Harrison, best known for science fiction, has published 13 novels.
- The Disappearers by Marlon James (Jamaica). A 640-page novel set in Kingston in 1988, built around a mob attack on a group of gay men rehearsing a play. It is also on the longlist for the US National Book Award.
- Black Bag by Luke Kennard (UK). A broke actor is hired by a professor to sit hidden in a bag at the back of a lecture hall, an idea drawn from a real 1967 experiment on the “mere-exposure effect”. Kennard is also a poet.
- May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (UK). A debut told across two timelines: the life of a reluctant medieval king and a modern curator trying to understand how history remembers him.
- The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (US). The Pulitzer Prize winner’s 11th novel. Strout was shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William! and longlisted in 2016 for My Name Is Lucy Barton.
- John of John by Douglas Stuart (Scotland). A young man returns home to the Isle of Harris, where he and his father share a secret, in a story about faith, duty and belonging. It is Stuart’s third novel.
Former winners return
Marlon James won the Booker in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Douglas Stuart won in 2020 with his first novel, Shuggie Bain. A win for either would make them only the fifth writer to take the prize twice, after J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
The shortlist covers four countries, England, Scotland, Jamaica and the United States, with four British writers among the six. Several longlisted books missed out, including a novel by an Irish author. Beard described the shortlisting meeting as one “none of the judges is likely to forget”, while the prize foundation’s chief executive, Gaby Wood, noted that “the prize rules demand a shortlist”.
What happens next
The winner will be announced on November 9, 2026, at a ceremony in London that will be streamed on the Booker Prize’s channels. The winning author receives £50,000. Each of the six shortlisted writers receives £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.
For readers, the shortlist is a good moment to pick up the books: finalists usually get a sales lift in the weeks before the ceremony, and all six are already published in the UK and Ireland, a condition of entry.