The Booker Prize 2026 Longlist: All 13 Books, and Who Makes the Shortlist

The Booker Prize 2026 longlist was announced on 28 July: thirteen novels chosen from 163 submissions, judged by a panel chaired by the classicist Mary Beard. The shortlist is announced at the Southbank Centre on 22 September 2026, and the winner at Old Billingsgate on 9 November.

One thing up front, because a lot of prize coverage pretends otherwise: we have not read all thirteen of these. Nobody outside the judging panel has. What follows is the complete longlist, and then an honest read on the shortlist based on track record and what this particular panel appears to be interested in. Treat the predictions as what they are.

The full 2026 longlist

• The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis (Mexico/USA, Chatto & Windus)
• Switzy by Emma Cline (USA, Chatto & Windus)
• Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (USA, Fitzcarraldo Editions)
• The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (UK, Serpent's Tail)
• The Disappearers by Marlon James (Jamaica, Hamish Hamilton)
• Black Bag by Luke Kennard (UK, John Murray)
• The Renovation by Kenan Orhan (Turkey/USA, Hamish Hamilton)
• May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (UK, Granta)
• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (UK, Picador)
• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (USA, Viking Press)
• John of John by Douglas Stuart (UK/USA, Picador)
• All Them Dogs by Djamel White (Ireland, John Murray)
• The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (UK, 4th Estate)

The panel is the story

Before the books, look at who is judging, because it tells you more about the eventual shortlist than any individual title does.

Mary Beard chairs. Alongside her sit the poet Raymond Antrobus, the writer Patricia Lockwood, Rebecca Liu, and Jarvis Cocker. That is a panel weighted heavily towards people whose own work is formally restless: two poets, a critic known for prose that refuses to sit still, and a lyricist. It is not a panel of conventional novelists.

Panels like that tend to reward sentences. Expect the shortlist to favour books doing something at the level of the prose over books with the most conventionally satisfying plots, and expect at least one selection that a general reader will find genuinely difficult.

The two returning winners

Two names on this list have already won the thing.

Douglas Stuart won in 2020 with Shuggie Bain, his debut, which he spent a decade writing and which drew on his own Glasgow childhood. He was only the second Scottish winner after James Kelman in 1994. John of John is his return to the longlist.

Marlon James won in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, the sprawling three-decade novel built around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, and became the first Jamaican writer to take the prize. The Disappearers puts him back in contention.

Repeat winners are rare. The Booker has produced only a handful in its history, and judging panels are conscious of that. A previous win is not a disqualification, but it does mean a returning winner tends to need to be clearly the best book in the room rather than merely one of the best.

The rest of the field

Beyond the two winners, this is a longlist with unusually deep back catalogues behind it.

Elizabeth Strout arrives with a Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge and previous Booker recognition for Oh William!. M. John Harrison has spent fifty years writing some of the strangest and most admired prose in British fiction, from the Viriconium sequence onward, and won the Goldsmiths Prize for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Gwendoline Riley has built a reputation on short, merciless novels about family damage, First Love and My Phantoms among them.

Emma Cline came to attention with The Girls and consolidated it with The Guest. Luke Kennard is primarily a poet, a Forward Prize winner, and was longlisted once before for The Transition. Missouri Williams made a considerable impression with The Doloriad. Chloe Aridjis has been quietly producing precise, unsettling novels since Book of Clouds.

Then there are the names with the least prize history attached, which on a Booker longlist is frequently where the interesting things happen: Makenna Goodman on Fitzcarraldo, Kenan Orhan, Rebecca Perry on Granta, and Djamel White.

Reading the field

A few patterns are worth noticing.

• The independents are well represented. Fitzcarraldo and Granta both placed books. Fitzcarraldo in particular has an extraordinary record of backing writers who go on to win major prizes, and a Fitzcarraldo title on a Booker longlist is never a filler pick.
• Poets keep turning up. Kennard and Perry both come from poetry. On a panel containing two poets, that is unlikely to be a coincidence.
• It is an international list. Mexico, Jamaica, Turkey, Ireland, the United States and the UK are all represented, which is what the Booker's eligibility rules now produce and what the prize's critics continue to argue about.
• The titles are strikingly plain. Black Bag. The Renovation. John of John. Switzy. There is very little decoration here, which tends to signal a certain kind of contemporary literary fiction.

What we would put money on

With the caveat above firmly in place: a panel this formally minded, working from this field, most plausibly shortlists Harrison, Riley and at least one of the two Fitzcarraldo-and-Granta outsiders. Strout is the most likely name to divide a panel like this one, being the most conventionally readable writer on the list, which is a compliment and, for these judges, possibly a problem.

The returning winners are the genuine unknowns. If either The Disappearers or John of John is the best thing its author has written, it goes through comfortably. If it is merely very good, this is a panel likely to give the place to someone else.

We will find out on 22 September.

Reading along

The longlist is the best reading list published in English each year, and the window between now and 22 September is the good part, when you can still read a few and form your own opinion before the shortlist collapses the conversation down to six.

If you are going to attempt more than one, keep a record of what you actually thought at the time. Prize reading is where reading logs earn their keep: opinions about a longlist shift enormously once the shortlist and then the winner are announced, and the only way to know what you genuinely thought in September is to have written it down in September.