Featuring novels from dystopian fiction to contemporary realism, from campus satire to historical fiction, the Booker Prize shortlist offers a collection of books that illustrate the shape of our humanity.

By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox

Yesterday, The Booker Foundation announced this year’s Booker Prize shortlist at a live event on stage in the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre in London. Selected from the longlist of 13 titles that Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation Gaby Wood described as “impossible for the judges to reduce to just six books,” this list span a ranges of genres.

Mary Beard, classicist and Chair of judges, announced the shortlist followed by brief readings from the shortlisted books by performers Omari Douglas, Miquita Oliver, and Prasanna Puwanarajah.

“These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated. In them, we meet characters from different countries and different centuries, created by authors 40 years apart, new talent and well-known favorites,” said Mary Beard,

‘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 Shortlist

• The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, (Serpent’s Tail;Profile Books)
• The Disappearers by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton; Penguin Random House)
• Black Bag by Luke Kennard (John Murray; Hachette)
• May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta)
• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout  (Viking Fiction; Penguin Random House)
• John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador; Pan Macmillan)

“Despite the great range in their styles and subjects, in all of these novels we find forms of isolation: relationships breaking down or withheld, people harboring secrets or pain, characters closing themselves off from others or attempting to reach beyond their solitude towards them,” said Wood.

“As a collection, this shortlist asks: What can we know of each other, what do we infer or assume, what are we prepared to see?”

The shortlist includes past winners Marlon James (2015, A Brief History of Seven Killings), Douglas Stuart (2020, Shuggie Bain), three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout (2016, My Name is Lucy Barton; 2022, Oh William!), as well as critically-acclaimed and award-winning newcomers to the Booker shortlist.

The Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026.  These nominees were selected by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by Beard, and including writer and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet, and essayist Patricia Lockwood.

The six shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner, which will be announced at a ceremony on Monday, November 9th at the Old Billingsgate in London, will receive £50,000 and a trophy named Iris (after 1978 winner Iris Murdoch).