CHENNAI: The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2026, one of the world’s major literary awards for a single work of fiction, was announced on Tuesday, September 22, featuring six novels spanning genres including dystopian fiction, contemporary realism, campus satire and historical fiction.
The shortlisted books are:
1. The End of Everything by M John Harrison — It follows a scavenger eking out an existence with his aunt on a post-apocalyptic Kent coast, against a backdrop of societal collapse and a mysterious alien invasion.
2. The Disappearers by Marlon James — James returns to the late 20th-century Jamaica that provided the backdrop to his Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings to explore the murder of a gay man – an actor rehearsing for a play – and its tragic consequences.
3. Black Bag by Luke Kennard — About a struggling actor accepting a role as part of a psychological university experiment: spend a term attending lectures zipped inside a large black bag to see how the other students react.
4. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry — The book sets the tribulations of a reluctant monarch in an unnamed medieval court against the work of an unnamed modern-day curator dressing public displays in an historic palace.
5. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout — A book about an ordinary Massachusetts teacher with an apparently comfortable life – yet who is quietly gripped with feelings of isolation and despair.
6. John of John by Douglas Stuart — It follows a young art graduate, who returns reluctantly to his windswept, repressive and deeply religious home on the Isle of Harris to resume – and confront – his old life.
The list includes two previous Booker Prize winners, Marlon James and Douglas Stuart, as well as Elizabeth Strout, who has previously been shortlisted. Four of the six authors are from the UK, while the authors represent England, Scotland, Jamaica and the US.
Several of the books draw directly from real events or people. James based The Disappearers on a violent incident rumoured to have occurred in Jamaica, while Kennard discovered the 1960s “black bag” experiment while researching another subject. Strout said the character of Artie Dam grew from an old obituary and an account told to her by a man who had once rescued someone from the sea.
Mary Beard, chair of the 2026 judging panel, described the shortlist as ranging “from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic”. She added, “This is writing at its best,” saying the books could “change the way we see the world” and challenge readers’ certainties. Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood said the six novels share themes of isolation, secrets and pain, adding that the shortlist asks: “What can we know of each other, what do we infer or assume, what are we prepared to see?”
Each shortlisted author receives £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on November 9 and will receive £50,000.