Announcing the Booker Prize 2026 longlist
The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction, has been revealed – a list that ‘rewards risk’ and offers ‘something for everyone’
This year’s ‘Booker Dozen’ has been revealed – 13 books by novelists who ‘brilliantly muster the power of words to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds’, according to Mary Beard, Chair of the judges.
Written by authors representing seven nationalities and three continents, the longlist transports readers from a hospital in Mexico City to the Kent seaside in a post-apocalyptic Britain; 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 dystopian 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 Booker Prize 2026 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
