Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, two previous winners of the Booker, have been named on this year’s longlist, alongside three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout, in a collection that “rewards risk”.
The 13 novels selected for the 2026 prize, announced on Tuesday, feature authors of seven nationalities across three continents, with almost half from the UK. Ten of the writers are appearing on a Booker longlist for the first time, including three debut novelists: Kenan Orhan, Rebecca Perry and Djamel White.
Chairing this year’s judging panel is the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard, who is joined on the panel by Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker.
Beard said that each book on the longlist “brilliantly musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds.
“I would not be telling the truth if I said that I hadn’t occasionally felt daunted, as a new box of 30 or so gleaming volumes landed on my doorstep,” she added.
James is longlisted for his fifth novel, The Disappearers, based around a homophobic mob attack in 1980s Jamaica, to be published in September. The judges called it “a reckoning” from “a singular literary talent”. James won the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Stuart, who won in 2020 with his debut, Shuggie Bain, returns with his third novel, John of John, which the judges praised for its “rich, textural detail”. Should either win again, they would become only the fifth author to take the Booker twice, joining JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
Strout, meanwhile, picks up her third Booker nomination for The Things We Never Say, her critically acclaimed 11th novel, which reckons with Trump’s America. Strout was longlisted in 2016 for My Name Is Lucy Barton and shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William!
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said the judges’ “range of tastes” and “openness of mind” had produced a list that “shows how capacious an art form the novel is”, adding that it “rewards risk” and contains “genuinely original work”.
The list also opens the door to two firsts. Chloe Aridjis, who is Mexican-British and longlisted for The Shadow of the Object, could become the first winner of Mexican heritage with her “mysterious and free-wheeling novel”. Kenan Orhan, Turkish-American and longlisted for his debut novel The Renovation, in which a woman discovers that her bathroom has become a prison cell, could become the first of Turkish heritage.
At 81, M John Harrison is the oldest on the list, longlisted for the first time for The End of Everything after 12 previous novels and a stint as a Booker judge himself in 2022. Should he go on to win, he would surpass Atwood as the prize’s oldest ever recipient (she was 79 when she jointly won in 2019). At the other end of the list is 28-year-old Djamel White, the only Irish writer on the list, whose debut, All Them Dogs, grew out of a short story and is set in the “criminal badlands” of west Dublin.
A total of 163 books were submitted, all written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
Joining Beard and Cocker on the judging panel are writer Raymond Antrobus, Booker prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood, and Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu. Cocker follows in the footsteps of others in the entertainment industry who have judged the prize in recent years, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Adjoa Andoh and Robert Webb.
“I was aware that I was, shall we say, the least formally qualified person on this jury, but I didn’t really let that bother me,” Cocker said in an interview. “Knowing that the Booker prizes tend to create panels including people who aren’t necessarily part of the literary world – but can read! – helped me, and I thought I was obviously supposed to bring something that others don’t: a different perspective.”
The list also includes Emma Cline’s Switzy, out in September, which tells the story of a man’s final journey to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich; Luke Kennard’s Black Bag, a comedy about a struggling actor; Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King, which has already won the 2026 Waterstones debut fiction prize; Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House, a portrait of literary London; and Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, billed as an antidote to the “cosy campus novel”.
The shortlist will be announced at the Southbank Centre in London on 22 September, with the winner named at a ceremony on 9 November.
Last year’s winner was David Szalay’s Flesh. Other recent winners include Samantha Harvey, Paul Lynch, Shehan Karunatilaka and Damon Galgut.
To explore all the books on the longlist for the Booker prize 2026 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.