On September 22, the shortlist for the Booker Prize was announced in London. Only six books out of a thousand others made the list. Just six novels that the jury deemed the best English-language works of the year. And the chair of this year’s Booker Prize jury is the renowned classicist, writer, and television host Mary Bird.
Among the finalists are two previous Booker Prize winners, one debut novel, and three authors making their first appearance on the shortlist. Together, they take readers on a fascinating journey: from post-apocalyptic Kent to 1980s Jamaica, from a nameless medieval court to a university lecture hall where someone is sitting inside a large black bag.
UA.News journalist Anita Violina will discuss each of the six books, who chaired this year’s judging panel, and how the entire process behind this highly prestigious award works. Read more in our article.
What Is the Booker Prize and Why Is It Important?
The Booker Prize has been around since 1969—a full 58 years. Each year, it honors the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives 50,000 pounds sterling and, just as importantly, guaranteed attention from millions of readers around the world.
Winning books traditionally shoot to the top of the bestseller lists immediately after the announcement and remain there for months. Over more than five decades of its existence, the prize has introduced a wide audience to Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Hilary Mantel—authors who have since become classics. So making the shortlist is a tremendous honor and a victory in itself. Such a book begins to be translated around the world, discussed, and read in places where, previously, perhaps no one would have even heard of it.
Every year, the Booker Foundation assembles a new five-member jury. These are people from various fields, but they are all guaranteed to have a connection to literature. This year, the jury was chaired by Mary Bird—a classicist, author of bestsellers on antiquity, and one of Britain’s most renowned public intellectuals. The jury also included poet Raymond Anthrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, literary critic Rebecca Liu, and writer Patricia Lockwood, who was herself nominated for the Booker Prize in 2021.
First, the jury selects the so-called “Booker Dozen,” a longlist of thirteen books announced in July. This is followed by several more months of reading and discussion, after which the list is narrowed down to six finalists. Finally, the winner is announced at a gala ceremony. This year, it will take place on November 9 at Old Billingsgate in London.
The 2026 Booker
Finalists
“Black Bag”
Author: Luke Kennard
Genre: campus novel, satire
This is probably the strangest book on this year’s shortlist. It sounds like an absurdist comedy, but it’s based on a real psychological experiment from 1967: a professor asks an amateur actor to spend an entire semester attending university lectures while sitting inside a large black bag.
The goal is to explore the so-called “mere-exposure effect”—the idea that we begin to form attachments to things and people simply through frequent exposure to them, even if we didn’t like them at first. It’s an offbeat novel about loneliness, intimacy, and how we become part of a community in the first place. The book promises to be fascinating.
“The End of Everything”
Author: M. John Harrison
Genre: dystopia, speculative fiction
M. John Harrison is one of the most important—and least well-known to the general public—British writers. He has written thirteen novels and several short story collections, and has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. Yet he remains an author read primarily by those who follow literature closely. However, the book *The End of Everything* may change that.
The novel is set on the Kent coast in post-apocalyptic Britain. The protagonist, Philip Tennant, survives—along with his aunt—by collecting and selling items washed ashore by the sea. The backdrop is social collapse and a mysterious invasion by something incomprehensible. Yet the book’s overall focus isn’t on the catastrophe itself. The author writes about how people continue to exist within it. A dark satire and dystopian fiction all in one story.
“The Disappearers”
Author: Marlon James
Genre: literary fiction, historical fiction
Marlon James has already won the Booker Prize once—in 2015, for his novel *A Brief History of Seven Killings*. If he wins again, he will become only the fifth author in the prize’s history to have done so twice. And, judging by the critics’ reactions, he has a good chance of winning.
This novel is based on a true story. 1988, Kingston, Jamaica. Eight men begin rehearsals for a play. They are all gay—and all forced to hide it in a society where homosexuality is punished brutally and publicly. One evening, they are attacked by a mob, and one of the actors is killed… The novel spans nearly two decades—from 1988 to 2005—and traces how this event ripples out and changes everyone who was connected to it in one way or another.
“May We Feed the King”
Author: Rebecca Perry
Genre: historical fiction
Rebecca Perry is the only debut author on this year’s shortlist and is already the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. She is a poet at heart, and this is evident in every sentence of the novel.
This story spans two time periods simultaneously. On the one hand, we encounter a modern curator who restores rooms in historic buildings, bringing them back to their original life, and in the opulent private chambers of a medieval palace, she becomes so enchanted by the reign of a king all but forgotten that the boundaries between her everyday life and a foreign past begin to blur more and more. On the other hand, there is the monarch himself, who never sought the crown but found himself on the throne after the sudden deaths of his older brothers and soon became entangled in the web of palace intrigues.
“The Things We Never Say”
Author: Elizabeth Strout
Genre: literary fiction
Elizabeth is a Pulitzer Prize winner. She has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice before, and this marks her third time on the shortlist.
“The Things We Never Say” tells the story of Artie Dam—an ordinary teacher from Massachusetts whose outwardly prosperous and comfortable life is, in reality, permeated by a sense of isolation and quiet despair. It’s a book about what remains unsaid between people—a story about the cost of that silence. This, incidentally, isn’t the first time Strout has written about people who are usually overlooked.
“John of John”
Author: Douglas Stuart
Genre: literary fiction
Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for his debut novel *Shuggie Bain* and has since become one of the most closely read authors in British literature. “John of John” is his third novel and, according to unanimous critical acclaim, his finest.
The story follows John-Calum MacLeod, a young art school graduate. He reluctantly returns home to the windswept island of Harris, where his father, a weaver, and his grandmother from Glasgow live. Father and son both harbor secrets they never speak of. Ultimately, this is a story about a relationship in which love and the inability to express it coexist, and which greatly hinder one another.
In
summary, the winner of the 2026 Booker Prize will be announced on November 9 at a gala ceremony in London. Predicting the outcome this time around is probably more difficult than usual. The shortlist is so diverse that any of the six books deserves to win this year.
