The Booker Prize 2026 Longlist: Which One Is For You
Thirteen novels, picked from 163, by a jury chaired by Mary Beard. Six of them survive 22 September and one of them takes £50,000 on 9 November. I have not read them — that is 3,854 pages in eight weeks, and nobody outside the jury has. So this is not a ranking. It is a matching exercise: what each one is, what it asks of you, and which of the thirteen is the one you would actually finish.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 longlisted novels · Shortlist 22 September · Winner 9 November · Updated September 2026
The longlist · 13 novels, 160 to 640 pages
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book. The number is its page count.
Longlist13 novels · announced 28 July 2026
Shortlist6 novels · 22 September 2026
Winner£50,000 · 9 November 2026
You are looking at the longlist. On 22 September this page narrows to the six, and on 9 November it names the winner. Same page, same link — worth a bookmark rather than a search.
Quick answer
Thirteen novels are longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026, chosen from 163 submissions by a panel chaired by Mary Beard. Six go through to the shortlist on 22 September, and the winner takes £50,000 on 9 November. Two previous winners are on the list — Marlon James and Douglas Stuart — and three of the thirteen are first novels. They are not interchangeable: the shortest runs 160 pages and the longest 640, and what they ask of a reader varies at least as much. Which is which is below.
How this list was made
I have not read these thirteen, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The longlist landed on 28 July. Between then and the shortlist there are eight weeks and 3,854 pages, and the only people who have read all of it are the five judges.
What I have done instead is read what the judges said, what the critics said, and what the publishers put on the back — and turned that into a matching exercise rather than a verdict. Every claim below is numbered and linked in the footnotes. Where I quote someone, it is their opinion and it says so.
When I have read one, this page will say so, and it will say something different.
All thirteen, easiest first
Not best to worst — I am in no position to tell you that yet. This runs from the book that asks least of you to the book that asks most, which is the one thing about a longlist you can judge from the outside.
01
Coastal Massachusetts · quiet realism
The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout · Viking · 7 May 2026 · 208 pages 67
Artie Dam is a history teacher in his fifties in a small town on the Massachusetts coast. Long marriage, modest hobbies, decent friends, and almost nobody who actually knows him. Then he learns something that makes him read thirty years of his own life differently.
It is 208 pages, told in short passages rather than continuous chapters. Nothing here is difficult at sentence level; the work the book asks of you is emotional, not technical.
Read it ifyou want the shortest distance between a longlisted novel and a reader who simply wants a good one. Of the thirteen, this is the one you could start tonight.
Not for you ifyou came to Strout for the warmth of Olive Kitteridge. Reviewers who know her work found this one colder and more political, with much less of the humour.
Strout was longlisted for the Booker in 2016 and shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William!
Douglas Stuart · Picador · 21 May 2026 · 416 pages 8
Cal Macleod, twenty-two and an art student in Edinburgh, comes back to the family croft on the Isle of Harris. He is there for his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who is failing, and he has to get past his father John, a Presbyterian sheep farmer with a fixed idea of what his son is. Cal does not fit that idea and does not say so.
It is 416 pages of straightforward, emotionally direct storytelling, and the first time Stuart has written outside urban Glasgow.
Read it ifShuggie Bain worked on you and you want the same thing with more air around it. The Irish Times called it his best yet, and said the queerness has a fuller range here than in either earlier novel.
Not for you ifyou want to be formally surprised. This is the most traditional novel on the longlist, and the longest of the easy ones.
Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 with his debut, Shuggie Bain.
Djamel White · John Murray · 26 March 2026 · 240 pages 9
Tony Ward comes back to the West Dublin gangland he left five years ago and starts collecting debts again. He falls in with Darren ‘Flute’ Walsh, an enforcer for a boss called Aengus Lavelle, and the two men want something from each other that neither has a way of saying out loud. What Tony left behind has been waiting.
240 pages, first person, a mob story told with the timing of a Dublin joke. White is Algerian-Irish and this is his first novel.
Read it ifyou want the one that moves. It is the most propulsive book on the longlist, and the tenderness in it arrives exactly where you are not braced for it.
Not for you ifthe violence of a gangland novel is not something you read for. The material is hyper-masculine, deliberately so.
The Irish Times placed its street lyricism in the company of Jim Carroll and Robert McLiam Wilson.
Luke Kennard · John Murray · 12 March 2026 · 400 pages 10
A thirty-seven-year-old actor with no work takes a job sitting inside a black leather bag at the front of a term’s worth of psychology lectures, as a restaging of a 1967 experiment. He turns out to be good at it. He keeps doing it after the lectures end. A post-humanism professor finds this interesting and his flatmate finds it monetisable.
400 pages, comic and conceptual, and as much about cryptocurrency, conformity and modern masculinity as about universities. Kennard is a Forward Prize-winning poet and this is his third novel.
Read it ifyou want to laugh at a longlisted book. The Guardian called it “tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes”.
Not for you ifan absurd premise carried for 400 pages sounds to you like a short story that got away.
The Booker’s own page reaches for Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and the comedy of Peep Show.
Kenan Orhan · Hamish Hamilton · 26 March 2026 · 256 pages 1112
Dilara, a Turkish political exile living in Italy, has the bathroom redone so her father, whose dementia is worsening, can use it. The builders finish and what they have built is not a bathroom. It is a replica of a cell in Istanbul’s Silivri prison, and through it she can see the guards.
256 pages of magical realism put to very concrete use: caregiving, money running out, a marriage under strain, and a country you cannot go back to. Orhan’s first novel, after the story collection I Am My Country.
Read it ifyou have ever lived somewhere that was not home and felt the other place still running underneath. The book is dedicated to caregivers and means it.
Not for you ifyou need the impossible thing explained. It is not going to be.
Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends a long time and meet at the same pub by the river. His father has died and the magazine he works for is coming apart; her mother is difficult and her own footing is not secure either. She keeps turning up while he sinks. That is the book.
224 pages, carried almost entirely by dialogue, with nothing explained. The Booker judges compared the talk to Henry Green.
Read it ifyou like a novel that trusts conversation to do all the work, and you are interested in a friendship rather than a marriage — new ground for a writer the Guardian calls the laureate of bad relationships.
Not for you ifyou want a plot. There is not one, on purpose.
First Love was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2017; My Phantoms followed in 2021.
Rebecca Perry · Granta · 29 January 2026 · 272 pages 1516
A curator rebuilds historic palace rooms and recreates their banquets for a living. She becomes absorbed by an obscure medieval king: the youngest and least willing of several brothers, on the throne only because the others died, with a court already turning against him. The two stories run together until it stops being clear which one is haunting which.
272 pages in fragments, written by a poet — Perry’s collection Beauty/Beauty was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is her first novel and it won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2026.
Read it ifobsession and displacement are the feelings you read for, and you do not need a plot to pull you along.
Not for you ifyou do. A Waterstones reviewer put it plainly: if you need plot to pull you forward, you may struggle.
Emma Cline · Chatto & Windus · 10 September 2026 · 334 pages 1718
David Hastings is a rich, retired American businessman in his seventies, flying across Europe with his assistant Cody. The destination is a Swiss clinic. His memory is going and the novel goes with it: childhood, the career, the people he failed, all arriving out of order. It is not an argument about assisted dying. It is one mind coming apart from the inside.
334 pages, fragmented and stream-of-consciousness, swinging between very funny and unbearable without warning.
Read it ifyou want the hardest look at mortality on the list, from the writer of The Girls, and you are not put off by a book that withholds its own ground.
Not for you ifdementia or assisted dying is close to home right now. This one softens nothing.
A reviewer set Cline’s fragmentation alongside Patricia Lockwood and Jenny Offill, and against Roth, Updike and Bellow: where they wrote defiance, she writes frailty.
Marlon James · Hamish Hamilton · 3 September 2026 · 640 pages 1920
Kingston, 1988. Eight gay men are rehearsing what would have been Jamaica’s first openly gay theatre production, a staging of Fortune and Men’s Eyes. A mob comes through the rehearsal. One man is killed, the rest are hurt, and two are never seen again. The novel follows the survivors, and the men who came through the door, through the years afterwards.
640 pages in five sections, built out of interview transcripts, journals and letters rather than a single voice. It is the longest and most ambitious book on the longlist.
Read it ifyou have the time and you want the one that is trying to be a major novel. Dwight Garner in the New York Times called it “the novel of the decade”, and then went further.
Not for you if640 pages of homophobic and racial violence, rendered close up, is not what you have room for.
James won the Booker Prize in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings.
Visiting family in Mexico City, Flora is bitten by the dog. Recovering in hospital she meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German collector of pre-cinema machinery, who shows her a magic lantern. Back in London, where Flora polishes silver for a living, she finds Wilhelmina’s son Max. What happens between them is never given a name.
192 pages, and the least willing book here to explain itself. The Irish Times called it deliberately opaque. Its subjects, in order, are time, memory, friendship and grief.
Read it ifyou read for atmosphere and image, and a novel that refuses to resolve is a pleasure rather than a problem.
Not for you if‘what actually happened’ is a question you need answered.
Sea Monsters won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2020. Reviewers of this one reached for Borges, Dante and Woolf.
M. John Harrison · Serpent’s Tail · 18 June 2026 · 208 pages 2324
Government has largely stopped working in the south-east of England, and the sea keeps putting things on the beach: the iGhetti, shape-shifting and not from here. Phillip Tennent scavenges what washes up near Dalston-on-Sea and sells it, living with his aunt Marnie, an artist whose memory is failing. Then he finds one that changes, and has to get it inland.
208 pages, spare and polished, and it will not tell you what the iGhetti are. Harrison has been doing this for fifty years; The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020.
Read it ifyou want speculative fiction that uses the strange to look harder at the real, and you are content to be left without an explanation.
Not for you ifyou want your science fiction to have a mechanism.
Michel Faber in the Guardian called it “dreamlike and baffling”, and meant it as praise.
Missouri Williams · 4th Estate · 21 May 2026 · 304 pages 2526
A university city where the buildings are losing to the plants, the academics are losing to each other, and a gardening sect is winning. Agathe, who uses a wheelchair, assists a professor who is a fraud; her mother’s suicide attempt left her paralysed. When a scandal breaks around a contrarian student named Adam, Agathe is sent to get close to him, and does.
304 pages working as allegory, thriller and philosophical argument at once, with a narrator who is not trying to be liked. What the scandal actually was is kept from you.
Read it ifyou want the campus novel taken apart rather than served. The publisher calls it a bracing antidote to cosy dark academia and that is accurate.
Not for you ifyou need a narrator you can side with.
Reviewers reached for Ottessa Moshfegh’s detached heroines and, from the publisher, a Ballardian ferocity. Her first novel was The Doloriad (2022).
A disgraced professor is shown around a house in the country. The estate agent tells him about Helen, who lived there before, and about the deliberate, stripped-down life she built inside it. By the end of the viewing he understands that he is being offered that life, and what it would cost. Four voices tell it: Man, Realtor, Helen, Wife.
160 pages, and the judges could not settle on whether it is a novel or a play. Part fable, part ghost story, part satire.
Read it ifyou want the most formally daring book on the list, and the shortest, and Thomas Bernhard is a name that makes you lean in.
Not for you ifclever is not enough on its own. The Irish Times admired how smart it is and still found it dull — “too clever by half”.
Three dates, and the thing most people get wrong about the money.
28 July 2026 — the longlist, thirteen novels out of 163 submitted. Done. 2
22 September 2026 — the shortlist, six novels, announced at the Southbank Centre in London and livestreamed.
9 November 2026 — the winner, at Old Billingsgate in London. 1
The winner gets £50,000. Every shortlisted author, the winner included, gets £2,500 1 — which is the part worth knowing, because for the five who do not win, the shortlist itself is the prize: it is what puts a book on a table at the front of the shop for a year.
This year’s jury is chaired by Mary Beard, with Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood. 4 Beard said they were after writers who use words on the page to take the reader somewhere new, which tells you roughly as much as these statements ever do — but the list they produced does back it up: three first novels, three independent publishers, and a 640-page Jamaican epic sitting next to a 160-page book the judges could not decide was a novel or a play. 35
Last year’s winner was David Szalay, for Flesh, on Monday 10 November 2025. 2937
Booker, Man Booker, International Booker: which is which
Three names, two prizes, and one of them is not what most people think it is.
The Booker Prize goes every year to the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. First awarded in 1969, run by the Booker Prize Foundation, funded by Crankstart since 2019, £50,000 to the winner. Novels only, and authors cannot enter themselves: only UK and Irish publishers may submit, which is why a novel can be excellent and never be considered at all. 3031 Since 2014 the author’s nationality has not mattered — before that the prize was open only to writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe, and that one change is why Americans have won it since. 32
Because it was, for seventeen years. One prize, three sponsors: Booker, McConnell — a food wholesaler — started it in 1969, the investment company Man Group funded it from 2002 to 2018, and Crankstart took over in 2019 and dropped the prefix. Milkman by Anna Burns, in 2018, was the last book to win it as the Man Booker Prize. If you see the two names used as though they were different awards, that is a mistake: they are the same one. 3233
And the International Booker Prize?
A different prize from the same foundation, for fiction translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. Annual, for a single book, since 2016; before that it ran every two years for a body of work. The £50,000 is split equally between the author and the translator, which is the part most people do not know and the part that matters most. 34
The 2026 International Booker went to Yáng Shuāng-zǐ for Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, announced on 19 May 2026 at Tate Modern. It is the first Mandarin-language book to win it. 35
Read the longlist, or read a winner?
Both are good answers. They answer different questions.
A winner is the safe bet. It has been read by hundreds of thousands of people and argued about in public, and there are forty-five of them since 1980 to choose from. They are all written up on their own page, with the eight I have actually read marked and reviewed — which is more than I can say for the thirteen above.
The thirteen above are the early bet. Six will be shortlisted on 22 September and one will win on 9 November. The difference between reading one of them in September and reading it in December is the difference between having an opinion and agreeing with one.
And there is a number that makes the case. According to the Booker Prize Foundation’s own figures, winning lifted Milkman’s weekly sales by 880 per cent, The Testaments by 1,340 per cent, Shuggie Bain by 1,900 per cent and The Promise by 1,925 per cent over a fortnight. 36 Every one of those books was sitting on a shelf the month before, at the same price and with nobody waiting. A Booker winner is the most widely read literary novel in Britain that year, which is not the same thing as the best one — and the two are worth holding apart.
Two past winners are on this year’s longlist: Marlon James, who won in 2015, and Douglas Stuart, who won in 2020 with his first novel. 1
If you would rather read a sure thing
A longlist is a bet. These are not:
Elizabeth Strout — every book she has written, and where to start if The Things We Never Say is your first.
Frequently asked questions about the Booker Prize 2026
What is the Man Booker Prize?
The same prize under a different sponsor. It was called the Man Booker Prize from 2002 to 2018, when the investment company Man Group funded it. Before that it carried the name of Booker, McConnell, the food wholesaler that started it in 1969, and since 2019 it has simply been the Booker Prize again. Milkman by Anna Burns, in 2018, was the last book to win it under the Man Booker name.
Can any nationality win the Booker Prize?
Yes, since 2014. Until then the prize was open only to writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe. The rule now is about the book rather than the author: any novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland is eligible, whoever wrote it. That change is why American writers have won it since.
When does the Booker Prize shortlist come out?
The Booker Prize 2026 shortlist is announced on Tuesday 22 September 2026, at the Southbank Centre in London, and it is livestreamed. Six of the thirteen longlisted novels go through. This page becomes the shortlist that day.
When is the Booker Prize winner announced?
The Booker Prize 2026 winner is announced on Monday 9 November 2026, at Old Billingsgate in London.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2025?
David Szalay, for Flesh, announced on Monday 10 November 2025. The judges considered 153 books that year.
Who won the International Booker Prize 2026?
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, for Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, announced on 19 May 2026 at Tate Modern. It is the first Mandarin-language book to win. The International Booker is a separate prize for fiction translated into English, and its £50,000 is split equally between the author and the translator.
How much is the Booker Prize worth?
The winner receives £50,000. Each of the six shortlisted authors, the winner included, receives £2,500 and a specially bound copy of their book.
How many books were submitted for the Booker Prize 2026?
163 novels were considered, and thirteen were longlisted on 28 July 2026.
Have any of these authors won the Booker Prize before?
Two have. Marlon James won in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Douglas Stuart won in 2020 with Shuggie Bain. Elizabeth Strout has been here before without winning: longlisted in 2016, shortlisted in 2022.
Have you read all thirteen longlisted books?
No. Thirteen novels published between January and September 2026 come to 3,854 pages, and nobody outside the jury has read all of them yet. So this page does not rank them. It tells you what each one is, what it asks of you, and who it is for, drawn from the judges, the critics and the publishers, with every source numbered at the bottom.
Facts last checked 14 September 2026. Page counts and publication dates are for the UK editions. One point where sources disagree and I have picked one: the UK publication date of The Shadow of the Object is given as both 16 and 26 April 2026, so it appears here as April 2026. The descriptions of each novel are drawn from the judges’ citations, the publishers and the reviews numbered above; the judgements about who each book is for are mine, made from that material rather than from reading the books.
This list was not put together by a machine. The notes are all mine, and the reading is still ahead of me.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every title, date, publisher and page count on this page is checked against the publication record; the sources are numbered in the footnotes. See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The shortlist is the prize. The winner is the headline.”
— What every publisher knows on 22 September.
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