22 September 2026

The Booker Prize 2026 shortlist

Six authors compete for the top prize in English-language literature

Tonight the judges of the Booker Prize, chaired by Mary Beard, have announced an authoritative shortlist of six authors, led by two former winners in Douglas Stuart and Marlon James. The shortlist is characterised by laureates of a range of prestigious literary prizes across the English-speaking world: from Pulitzer-winning Elizabeth Strout to M John Harrison, winner of our very own New Statesman Goldsmiths Prize. There are two outsiders in Luke Kennard and Rebecca Perry, but they too are award-winning poet-turned-novelists.

Douglas Stuart had won the prize in 2020 for Shuggie Bain and Marlon James in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings; in a way, their latest novels continue the project of their previously feted titles. James’s The Disappearers continues his excavation of Jamaican history with an eye on the themes of homophobia and violence. Stuart’s John of John maps, yet again, a corner of queer Hibernia, trading 1980s working class Glasgow for the 1990s Isle of Harris, in the Hebrides.

“On Harris, I found a rich, inspiring culture; a culture shaped by community, with a history of crofting and weaving, in a place that is the stronghold of the Gaelic language and a very devout form of Presbyterianism,” Stuart has said, while James has spoken of the particular Caribbean relationship to fiction. “In Jamaica, we trust rumours more than facts.” The judges’ citations for both novels highlighted the places in which they are set.

Although she has only been nominated for the Booker before, Elizabeth Strout is certainly the biggest name on the shortlist – and, as an American, the only author who would not have qualified under the prize’s rule change in 2014. The author of the bestselling My Name is Lucy Barton and the “Olive Kitteridge” fiction cycle – which was made into an HBO series – Strout perhaps doesn’t need the Booker; that certainly doesn’t mean she can’t deserve one for The Things We Never Say, another tale of small-town Americana, family secrets, coastal atmosphere. Our reviewer Ellen Peirson-Hagger, however, writing in the New Statesman earlier this year, expressed reservations about the novel laying “on the trauma especially thick”.

M John Harrison is not as famous as Strout; and he has only won a New Statesman Goldsmiths Prize as opposed to a Booker or a Pulitzer, but aged 81, he is certainly the grandee on the list. Unquestionably engaged in the science fiction and fantasy genres, he has also earned serious literary acclaim for his style and imagination. For the critic Robert Macfarlane, Harrison is “among the most brilliant novelists writing today, with regard to whom the question of genre is an irrelevance.” The End of Everything is a post-apocalyptic adventure involving aliens and social collapse. But it’s also satirical and funny. “There still were moments we found ourselves laughing aloud,” the judges say. New Statesman critic Aled Maclean-Jones has been defender of Harrison’s project for many years and his review places The End of Everything in a venerable tradition encompassing Neville Shute, John Wyndham and JG Ballard.

On the riskier side of the list – authors whose winning of the Booker would perhaps not have been predicted at the start of the process – are the poets: Rebecca Perry and Luke Kennard. With Black Bag, Kennard finds himself shortlisted for his 15th book (and third novel), but he is far from a household name and largely known in the British poetry scene (Notes on the Sonnets won the 2021 Forward Prize). Perry, the youngest author on the shortlist, born 1986, is also a stalwart of the same scene. Both poets have conceptually rich offerings on the shortlist. Kennard’s Black Bag has as its starting point a 1960s experiment in which a student had to attend lectures wearing a black bag over their head. Kennard’s fiction imagines a down-on-his-luck actor recreating the experiment. Hilarity ensues. Perry’s novel combines the story of a medieval king with a museum curator who recreates historical banquets. Ideas vein through both these novels, without overpowering their whimsy.

And then there are the omissions; many readers will feel aggrieved by these. Among the novels that have won a devoted following already are The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis and Switzy by Emma Cline. These may be at different ends of the possibilities of fiction, but had a level of accomplishment that, in other years, might have catapulted them to the shortlist. It’s not their year.