Past Booker Prize winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart make 2026 shortlist

Former Booker Prize-winning authors Marlon James and Douglas Stuart have been shortlisted for the 2026 award. The Jamaican and Scottish writers are also nominated alongside American novelist Elizabeth Strout, who has previously been shortlisted for the prize too. The list, whittled down from a longlist of 13, features four authors from the UK. Irish writer Djamel White did not make the shortlist after being longlisted following the success of his debut novel All Them Dogs. The other authors on the shortlist are M. John Harrison, Luke Kennard and Rebecca Perry. One of the books featured is James' The Disappearers, a 640-page novel that focuses on a group of gay men in Jamaica in the 1980s. James won the prize in 2015 with A Brief History Of Seven Killings, and Stuart won in 2020 with his debut novel Shuggie Bain. Stuart has been nominated for his novel John Of John, which follows a young man returning home to the island of Harris. If either James or Stuart were to win, they would be the fifth author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice, joining J.M. Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012) and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019). The list also features Pulitzer prize-winner and three-time Booker Prize nominee Strout, who has been shortlisted for her 11th novel, The Things We Never Say. She was nominated in 2016 for My Name Is Lucy Barton and shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William! Harrison, 81, who has been nominated for The End Of Everything, could become the oldest winner in the prize's history. He is an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer best known for the Viriconium series Climbers and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Set in post-apocalyptic Britain, on the Kent coast, his novel follows beachcomber Phillip Tennent as he discovers a new artefact he must keep to himself before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The title of the oldest winner in the history of the prize is currently held by Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she won the 2019 prize for The Testaments. Perry has been recognised for her debut novel May We Feed The King. Djamel White, author of the novel All Them Dogs which was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026 © Bríd O'Donovan The story is told across dual timelines, following a medieval king and a modern day curator respectively, and has won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The shortlist is rounded out by Kennard and his novel Black Bag, which follows a penniless actor hired by a professor to sit in a black bag at the back of the lecture hall. Mary Beard, chairwoman of judges, said deciding what books to choose for the shortlist was a meeting 'none of the judges is likely to forget'. 'Most of these books were beginning to feel like old friends after at least two readings, and it was painful to have to let some of them go, with their now bent spines and dog-eared pages, their brilliant capacity to make us think, argue and sometimes disagree,' she said. 'We did not start out with a checklist of the different types of book we wanted to see represented in the final six, or the kinds of authors or subject matter. 'But when we looked at the lineup of our shortlist, neatly propped up against one another, almost glowing, we were happy that we had showcased many of the strengths of contemporary English language fiction. 'These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated. 'In them, we meet characters from different countries and different centuries, created by authors 40 years apart, new talent and well-known favourites.' She said the novels were 'writing at its best' and offered both 'blissful escapism' and 'plenty to change the way we see the world'. The judging panel includes award-winning poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood. Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood added: 'I knew it would be almost impossible for the judges to reduce their phenomenal longlist to just six books, and it was. 'But the prize rules demand a shortlist, These six, which struck the judges strongly the first time they read them and deepened when read again, speak to each other in unexpected ways by virtue of being placed side by side. 'Despite the great range in their styles and subjects, in all of these novels we find forms of isolation: relationships breaking down or withheld, people harbouring secrets or pain, characters closing themselves off from others or attempting to reach beyond their solitude towards them. 'As a collection, this shortlist asks: What can we know of each other, what do we infer or assume, what are we prepared to see? 'Sentence by sentence, the writing in every one of them is exceptional. I would recommend this list to any reader: each book, perhaps, for a different state of mind.' The winning title and author will be announced on November 9 at a ceremony in London and livestreamed on the Booker Prize's channels. The winner will receive £50,000 and a trophy named Iris. Last year's winner was British-Hungarian author David Szalay and his novel Flesh. The 2026 Booker Prize shortlist in full: The End Of Everything by M John Harrison The Disappearers by Marlon James Black Bag by Luke Kennard May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout John Of John by Douglas Stuart