Previous winners Douglas Stuart and Marlon James lead Booker prize longlist | Books

Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, two earlier winners of the Booker, have been named on this yr’s longlist, alongside three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout, in a set that “rewards risk”.

The 13 novels chosen for the 2026 prize, introduced on Tuesday, function authors of seven nationalities throughout three continents, with nearly half from the UK. Ten of the writers are showing on a Booker longlist for the primary time, together with three debut novelists: Kenan Orhan, Rebecca Perry and Djamel White.

Chairing this yr’s judging panel is the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard, who’s joined on the panel by Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker.

Beard mentioned that every guide on the longlist “brilliantly musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds.

“I would not be telling the truth if I said that I hadn’t occasionally felt daunted, as a new box of 30 or so gleaming volumes landed on my doorstep,” she added.

James is longlisted for his fifth novel, The Disappearers, based mostly round a homophobic mob assault in Nineteen Eighties Jamaica, to be revealed in September. The judges known as it “a reckoning” from “a singular literary talent”. James won the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Stuart, who won in 2020 with his debut, Shuggie Bain, returns along with his third novel, John of John, which the judges praised for its “rich, textural detail”. Should both win once more, they might grow to be solely the fifth creator to take the Booker twice, becoming a member of JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.

Strout, in the meantime, picks up her third Booker nomination for The Things We Never Say, her critically acclaimed eleventh novel, which reckons with Trump’s America. Strout was longlisted in 2016 for My Name Is Lucy Barton and shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William!

Gaby Wood, chief govt of the Booker Prize Foundation, mentioned the judges’ “range of tastes” and “openness of mind” had produced a listing that “shows how capacious an art form the novel is”, including that it “rewards risk” and accommodates “genuinely original work”.

The record additionally opens the door to 2 firsts. Chloe Aridjis, who’s Mexican-British and longlisted for The Shadow of the Object, might grow to be the primary winner of Mexican heritage together with her “mysterious and free-wheeling novel”. Kenan Orhan, Turkish-American and longlisted for his debut novel The Renovation, through which a lady discovers that her lavatory has grow to be a jail cell, might grow to be the primary of Turkish heritage.

At 81, M John Harrison is the oldest on the record, longlisted for the primary time for The End of Everything after 12 earlier novels and a stint as a Booker choose himself in 2022. Should he go on to win, he would surpass Atwood because the prize’s oldest ever recipient (she was 79 when she collectively gained in 2019). At the opposite finish of the record is 28-year-old Djamel White, the one Irish author on the record, whose debut, All Them Dogs, grew out of a brief story and is about within the “criminal badlands” of west Dublin.

A complete of 163 books had been submitted, all written in English and revealed within the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

Joining Beard and Cocker on the judging panel are author Raymond Antrobus, Booker prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood, and Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu. Cocker follows within the footsteps of others within the leisure trade who’ve judged the prize in recent times, together with Sarah Jessica Parker, Adjoa Andoh and Robert Webb.

“I was aware that I was, shall we say, the least formally qualified person on this jury, but I didn’t really let that bother me,” Cocker mentioned in an interview. “Knowing that the Booker prizes tend to create panels including people who aren’t necessarily part of the literary world – but can read! – helped me, and I thought I was obviously supposed to bring something that others don’t: a different perspective.”

The record additionally contains Emma Cline’s Switzy, out in September, which tells the story of a person’s remaining journey to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich; Luke Kennard’s Black Bag, a comedy a few struggling actor; Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King, which has already gained the 2026 Waterstones debut fiction prize; Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House, a portrait of literary London; and Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, billed as an antidote to the “cosy campus novel”.

The shortlist shall be introduced on the Southbank Centre in London on 22 September, with the winner named at a ceremony on 9 November.

Last yr’s winner was David Szalay’s Flesh. Other latest winners embrace Samantha Harvey, Paul Lynch, Shehan Karunatilaka and Damon Galgut.