The 13 titles longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize have been selected by the 2026 judging panel chaired by classicist Mary Beard.
First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize is regarded as the leading award for high-quality literary fiction written in English.
Says Beard of the longlist: “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.”
Beard is joined on the judging panel by Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu, and Patricia Lockwood.
The 2026 longlist includes titles penned by two past winners - Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain) - and three debut novelists: Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation, Djamel White’s All Them Dogs and Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King.
According to the Booker Prize website the longlisted titles offers a vast variety: There’s humour and heartbreak, satire and surreality. There are fresh takes on dystopian sci-fi, royal history, the crime thriller and the campus novel. There are books about memory, mortality, metamorphosis and murder; about old lives and new worlds; about the things we hide from those around us and the limits of human understanding; about reconciliation and retribution; and about the many ways we reckon with the past.
The complete list of longlisted titles are:
- The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis (Chatto & Windus)
- Switzy by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus)
- Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail)
- The Disappearers by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton)
- Black Bag by Luke Kennard (John Murray)
- The Renovation by Kenan Orhan (Hamish Hamilton)
- May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta)
- The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (Picador)
- The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)
- John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador)
- All Them Dogs by Djamel White (John Murray)
- The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (4th Estate)
The Booker Prize 2026 shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 during a public event featuring the judges at the Southbank Centre in London.
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