Previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart shortlisted for Booker prize
The two authors are in the running for the £50,000 award alongside a Pulitzer winner, a science fiction legend, a comic writer and a debut novelist
Novelist and poet Luke Kennard and debut novelist Rebecca Perry are also in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on Monday 9 November.
James, the Jamaican writer who took home the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, was shortlisted this time for The Disappearers. Set in Aids-era Jamaica, the novel centres around an attack on a group of queer men rehearsing John Herbert’s prison-set play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Coming in at 640 pages, it’s the longest on the list.
Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain; this time, he’s nominated for John of John, which tells the story of John-Calum Macleod’s homecoming to the Outer Hebrides. The book is an “ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence”, wrote Yagnishsing Dawoor in a Guardian review.
Strout, who won the 2009 Pulitzer prize for her novel Olive Kitteridge, was previously longlisted for the Booker in 2016 for My Name is Lucy Barton, and shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William! This year, she is shortlisted for The Things We Never Say, which departs from the well-known cast of characters in her previous novels to introduce the history teacher Artie Dam, whose comfortable life on the Massachusetts coast is threatened by a secret, and by the realities of a changing US.
Harrison, who judged the prize in 2022, is shortlisted for The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic novel set in an unnamed Kent coastal town. The book, “as its title suggests, is about everything”, wrote Michel Faber in the Guardian. “It burrows deep into our psyches – into the psyche of our civilisation – and exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now.”
The shortlisted books “took risks”, and they “could not be replicated by artificial intelligence – these are very human books”, said the writer Raymond Antrobus, who is on this year’s judging panel alongside the chair Mary Beard, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, the writer Patricia Lockwood, and Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu.
Kennard made the list for Black Bag, his comic campus novel about an actor in his late 30s who takes a job involving attending lectures in a black leather bag as part of a psychological experiment.
Completing the shortlist is Perry, the sole debut novelist, with May We Feed the King. The book – which won this year’s Waterstones debut prize – is about a modern-day curator tasked with dressing rooms in historic houses, who becomes increasingly obsessed with the life of a medieval king.
Four of the shortlisted titles are by men, and three of them – Black Bag, The Disappearers, and John of John – explore masculinity and male sexuality. That the shortlisted authors are predominantly male is “quite surprising, because generally speaking the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”, said Cocker. The masculinity theme may come down to men “having to rethink their role”, he added. Beard said she doesn’t think it’s a “very masculine” shortlist, while Lockwood half-joked that “all these books are gay”.
Among the surprises on the shortlist was the absence of American author Emma Cline, whose novel Switzy, which follows a man suffering from dementia travelling to a euthanasia clinic, received positive reviews across the board, amid predictions that it could win the overall award. British author Gwendoline Riley also failed to make the cut with her longlisted novel The Palm House.
The judges said the shortlisting meeting lasted approximately three hours. The five other books that didn’t make the shortlist were The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis, Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman, The Renovation by Kenan Orhan, All Them Dogs by Djamel White, and The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams.
This year’s prize was open to books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
Last year’s prize was awarded to David Szalay for his novel Flesh. Recent winners include Samantha Harvey for Orbital, Paul Lynch for Prophet Song, and Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
