This year’s Booker prize shortlist could feature oldest ever winner

This year’s Booker Prize could produce its oldest ever winner, with 81-year-old sci-fi author M John Harrison among the six shortlisted authors for 2026.

If Harrison were to win for his speculative novel The End of Everything, he would be the oldest winner in the award’s 57-year history – a title currently held by Margaret Atwood who was 79 when she jointly won in 2019 with The Testaments.

This is Harrison’s first nomination, though he served as a judge in 2022. Pushing the boundaries of fiction, The End of Everything “can be read as a thriller, a mystery, a satire, a dystopia, a road novel, a work of realism”, said the judges.

The shortlist features two previous winners, Marlon James and Douglas Stuart, as well as one past shortlistee Elizabeth Strout.

Authors from the UK dominated the list of six, with English author Luke Kennard also nominated for his book Black Bag.

The shortlist of six novels – “which we believe cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence” – was announced at an event held at the Southbank Centre in central London on Tuesday evening, with all five judges present.

The judging panel is chaired by classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard, and includes award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, critic Rebecca Lieu, and Patricia Lockwood who was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021.

The only debut novelist on the list is Rebecca Perry, a former trampolinist and award-winning poet whose first work of fiction May We Feed the King – about a curator who becomes obsessed with the life of a medieval king – has been hailed as “unusual, evocative and incredibly moving” by The Independent’s culture editor Jessie Thompson.

If Perry were to win, she would be only the seventh debut novelist winner in the prize’s 57-year history.

Another relative newcomer to the prize is poet and novelist Kennard who has earned his first Booker nomination for his third novel Black Bag, inspired by a real social psychology university experiment undertaken in Oregon in the 1960s.

Jamaican author James – who won the Booker in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings – is back on the shortlist with The Disappearers, inspired by a violent homophobic incident in Jamaica that is rumoured to have taken place in the 1980s, but has never been proven. The judges praised his “shifting register of the dialogue and poetic phrasings” and “double-edged humour”.

Scottish-American writer Stuart, meanwhile, makes his second appearance on the Booker shortlist with John of John, having previously taken home the prize for his 2020 debut novel Shuggie Bain. His second novel, Young Mungo, was also longlisted.

“A rich and moving novel about a father and son who live on a remote Scottish island in the 1990s, where small-town secrets and buried shame reverberate to surprising, devastating, even joyous effect,” said the judges of John of John.

If either James or Stuart were to win, they would join an illustrious list of two-time Booker prize winners, including JM Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012) and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019).

Another familiar name on the list is three-time nominee American writer Strout, who is chosen this year for her 11th novel The Things We Never Say – a book set in Massachusetts that she began writing after reading an obituary of a man with a near-identical name in a decades-old newspaper clipping.

The only American featured on the shortlist, Strout, the judges said, has written “a novel that engages with the deeply devising politics of present-day America without itself becoming divisive”.

A diverse selection of books, the judges were reluctant to draw any one connecting theme between them.

“We really wanted to build a list that was full of variety that had lots of you know things that were idiosyncratic that might not be universally loved but that might draw strong opinion, and so I think we built that list around that,” said Liu. “We wanted to reward risk. We wanted distinctly human books and formal risks. And we wanted a variety of tones.”

“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,” added Beard. “This is writing at its best.

“There’s plenty to enjoy, some blissful escapism and prose to die for (‘I just wish I could have written that’ kept going through my mind). But there is also plenty here to change the way we see the world, to surprise us and to challenge our certainties.”

Seven titles from the Booker longlist did not make the shortlist: The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis, Switzy by Emma Cline, Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman, The Renovation by Kenan Orhan, The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley, All Them Dogs by Djamel White, The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams.

The omission of Cline’s Switzy comes as a particular surprise given the positive publicity that the book, about a man with Alzheimer’s seeking euthanasia in Switzerland, has received in recent weeks.

Asked whether the novel’s exclusion prompted discord among the judges, Beard responded: “There was discussion and disagreement about all the books.”

“People talk about exclusion – why was it overlooked or whatever – but in a sense, that is the reverse of the way that we are seeing things. We were thinking about what to bring in, what to include – not what to exclude. We could go through dozens of wonderful books that have not actually ended up on the shortlist.”

Lockwood noted the existence of “hype cycles”, adding that “many books went through that same bubble and we’re not talking about them… we’re talking about the one that just recently had its moment”.

Chosen from 163 submissions, the Booker Prize shortlist celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

The winner of the Booker prize will be announced on 9 November, and receive £50,000 and a trophy named Iris, named after 1978 winner Iris Murdoch. Last year’s winner was Flesh by David Szalay. Other recent winners include Samantha Harvey, Paul Lynch, Shehan Karunatilaka, and Damon Galgut.

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