Booker

Booker prize 2026: ask our books team anything about this year’s contenders

This year’s shortlist for the Booker prize was announced last night. Our books editors will be logging on at 1pm to discuss this year’s nominees, from previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart to debut novelist Rebecca Perry. Post your questions or discussion points now Sign in or sign up For today’s reader Q&A we’ll be discussing the newly announced shortlist for the 2026 Booker prize which was revealed last night at a discussion at London’s Southbank centre featuring this year’s judging panel : Jarvis Cocker, Mary Beard, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and the Guardian’s own Rebecca Liu . The panel’s final six selections for 2026 are: Continue reading...

The Guardian•Guardian moderators (now); Justine Jordan, Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer (from 1pm)6h ago

• neutral toward Booker · 99%

Booker Prize judges reveal shortlisted novels after selection 'tussle'

Past Booker winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are among the nominees for this year's award.

BBC19h ago

I read 163 novels and these are the six best: Mary Beard on judging the Booker prize

I found being a Booker judge hugely rewarding. All the works on our shortlist will change how you see the world • This year’s Booker prize shortlist As a Booker judge, I think I have worked harder than I have ever done before. Reading 163 novels in six months, making careful assessments, being ready to argue for your judgment, going back to check you haven’t got it wrong … in some ways it took more energy than actually writing a book. But it was also hugely rewarding and fun. I shall never forget the discussions in our regular judging meetings, and the pleasure of discovering how we had sometimes reached almost exactly the same view of a book, and sometimes dramatically diverged. There were no big newsworthy squabbles, but a lot of discussion, a lot of listening and re-reading. When each new batch of 30 or so novels arrived at home, through the spring, I plunged in and picked them out at random (only occasionally cheating by selecting a slim volume when I felt I needed to get my total up!) But so that you have more to go on, here is a quick guide to each of the books on the shortlist – in strictly alphabetical order. Explore the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize and, for a limited time, get all six books for only £79 at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply. Continue reading...

The Guardian•Mary Beard19h ago

• favorable toward Booker · 86%

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 • Booker judge Mary Beard on this year’s shortlist This year’s Booker prize shortlist features some very familiar names – previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are in the running once more, along with Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout and prominent British speculative fiction writer M John Harrison. 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. Continue reading...

The Guardian•Ella Creamer19h ago

• neutral toward Booker · 98%

Cory Booker Slams Paramount-WBD Merger Settlement But Blames Company And DOJ, Not State AGs

Sen. Cory Booker (D-CA) weighed in on the proposed settlement reached between Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery and state attorneys general, criticizing the agreement yet casting blame on the David Ellison-run company and the Justice Department. In a statement, Booker said, “This is what happens when federal enforcers abandon their posts. States are left to carry the […]

Deadline•Ted Johnson20h ago

• neutral toward DOJ · 95%

The best books to read in September: new paperbacks from Margaret Atwood, Kiran Desai and Richard Holmes

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some great new paperbacks, from an epic multigenerational saga by a Booker winner to a biography of an iconic Victorian poet *** Continue reading...

The Guardian•Guardian Staff18 Sept

Anita Brookner by Hermione Lee review – an enigmatic literary great given her due

This exhaustive biography of the Booker winner brings her properly out of the shadows for the first time ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.” The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more. Continue reading...

The Guardian•Lucy Atkins1 Sept

Switzy by Emma Cline review – this Booker-listed account of a man’s last days is profoundly moving

Struggling with Alzheimer’s, the central character sets out on his final journey to a euthanasia clinic The word “Alzheimer’s” never appears in Switzy, Emma Cline’s third novel, which arrives pre-endorsed as a Booker prize longlistee. But we can be certain that it is the disease afflicting its central character, David Hastings – certain in a way he finds it increasingly hard to be about anything. When the novel begins, David and his assistant Cody are aboard a private jet flying from his home in the US to the UK. Landing at London City airport (which the book, experiencing its own senior moment, situates in the countryside), they visit David’s daughter and her family before travelling on to Zurich (hence “Switzy”). One more appointment, a catchup with an old boarding school roommate called Tom, awaits just over the French border, after which David will be euthanised at a facility resembling Dignitas. Continue reading...

The Guardian•Chris Power31 Aug

The Disappearers by Marlon James review – a scorching exposé of homophobia in Jamaica

This Booker-listed epic set in Aids-era Kingston is a triumph – bitter, bawdy and ravishingly queer “A sense of sweep,” replied Marlon James, when asked what moves him most in literature. “Sweep isn’t just about external journeys, but internal as well. It can be over years and decades, or across land and sea.” If that explanation is still hazy, pick up his mighty new novel, which is longlisted for this year’s Booker prize and is tirelessly – sometimes exhaustingly – grand and peripatetic. Mounting a grisly exposé of Jamaican homophobia, this polyphonic 640-page doorstopper is an emotionally bruising narrative that roves “uptown, downtown, ghetto and gully” through Aids-era Kingston with sidetrack excursions to 1950s England and a closing leap to 2000s United States. The novel’s defining event is a gruesome mob attack on eight queer men who have clandestinely come together to work on bringing John Herbert’s 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, to the stage. The goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter “the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality”. “Because prison,” he explains, “is the ultimate male institution and yet masculine sexualities that could never happen outside in the normal world flourish in there all the time.” Continue reading...

The Guardian•Yagnishsing Dawoor24 Aug