The longlist for the Booker Prize 2026, the leading literary award in the English-speaking world for a single work of fiction, has been announced.
The Booker Prize 2026 longlist transports readers from a hospital in Mexico City to the Kent seaside in a post-apocalyptic Britain to an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich, from the barren hillsides of the Outer Hebrides to the criminal badlands of West Dublin, from Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1980s to coastal Massachusetts in the run up to the 2024 US election, from an unnamed medieval court to a prison cell that defies explanation.
Tonally diverse, the books abound with humour and heartbreak, satire and surreality. There are fresh takes on post-apocalyptic sci fi, royal history, the crime thriller and the campus novel. They are about memory, mortality, metamorphosis and murder; about old lives and new worlds; about the limits of human understanding; about reconciliation and retribution; about the lengths we go to in order to survive; and about the many ways we reckon with the past.
The longlist
- The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis
- Switzy by Emma Cline
- Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
- The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
- The Disappearers by Marlon James
- Black Bag by Luke Kennard
- The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
- May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
- The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
- The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
- John of John by Douglas Stuart
- All Them Dogs by Djamel White
- The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams
The judges
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 13 books has been selected by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by celebrated classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard. Beard is joined by award-winning poet and writer Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood.
Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges, says:
‘It’s been an extraordinary seven months. The five Booker judges have each read 163 books, discussed and debated them, and sometimes re-read them, to whittle them down to a longlist of just 13. 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. (Just think: if you include the re-reading and the occasional day off, you have to average a book a day to get through the total.) But what I shall most remember is the eye-opening pleasure of it all, and what I learnt about reading and the power of fiction from my fellow judges. I’ve also felt increasingly humbled by the novels and the novelists themselves. I have come away with huge admiration for anyone who can craft a work of fiction from start to finish.
’Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock. And they are set anywhere and everywhere: Ireland and Italy, Mexico and Massachusetts, Jamaica and the Hebrides, universities, private planes and pubs, past, present and future. But there’s one thing they all share. Every writer on our 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.
‘Books are not mirrors: they don’t simply reflect ourselves back to us. One of the many important things about fiction is that it helps us see what it might be like not to be us, to begin to understand the perspectives of others, and to imagine what it might be like to see the world differently. Great books are not cosy. In their various ways, the novels we have chosen are (we hope) dynamite.’
The shortlist and winner announcements
Shortlist announcement event with the Booker Prize 2026 judges: 7.00pm BST, Tuesday, 22 September 2026, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London
Join the judges of the Booker Prize 2026, Chair Mary Beard, Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood in conversation with Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood, as they announce the shortlist for this year’s prize live on stage.
Tickets can be booked at southbankcentre.co.uk.
Details of all Booker Prize events can be found here.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London on Monday, 9 November.
Get involved
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What do you think of the 2026 longlisted titles? Which have you read and what will be added to your TBR pile? Add your comments below, or click any title above to leave a review.
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