Booker Prize 2026 shortlist includes 81-year-old M. John Harrison, who could become oldest winner

Harrison and the record

Harrison is 81 and this is his first Booker nomination. If he wins, he would become the oldest winner in the prize's history. Margaret Atwood was 79 when she jointly won in 2019, the record he would pass.

Tom Tivnan, deputy editor of the Bookseller, told the Observer that Harrison has long been considered a genre writer because his novels are mostly science fiction. Tivnan put that down to the "snobbishness of the literary establishment" and said Harrison would benefit from the chance to be taken seriously as a literary author.

Tivnan also said a longlisting tends to bring a "triple figure percentage uplift" in sales. Authors start to get noticed by other prizes and foreign publishers, he said. "People prick up their ears," he told the Observer.

The six books

The six shortlisted novels are The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and John of John by Douglas Stuart.

Harrison's The End of Everything is a post-apocalyptic novel set on the Kent coast. James's The Disappearers is set in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988 and follows the aftermath of a violent attack on eight gay men during a play rehearsal. Kennard's Black Bag is a comedy about an out-of-work actor paid to sit through university lectures with a leather bag over his head, based on a 1960s psychology experiment. Perry's May We Feed the King, the only debut novel on the shortlist, moves between a modern curator and a reluctant medieval king. Strout's The Things We Never Say is set in coastal Massachusetts. Stuart's John of John returns to the Outer Hebrides.

The Disappearers runs to 640 pages, the longest on the shortlist. The shortlist was chosen from 13 longlisted titles, which were picked from 163 submissions. Seven longlisted titles were jettisoned, the BBC reported.

The judges

Mary Beard chaired the panel, which also included the poet Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, the journalist Rebecca Liu and the novelist Patricia Lockwood. The judges met monthly, the Observer reported.

Antrobus said the books "cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence". Beard said they range "from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic". Liu said the judges wanted a list "full of variety" that "might draw a strong opinion". Cocker said it "took a while actually to get a book written by a man that seemed good".

Beard said agreeing on the final six "has been, to put it mildly, hard work". Cocker read entries while on tour and joined one meeting online from a hotel room in Australia at 02:00, wearing a towelling robe, the BBC reported. Lockwood said she discovered she was "bossier than I believed myself to be".

The field and the money

James won the Booker in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain. Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022.

The longlist ran from Djamel White, 28, to Harrison at 81. The Observer reported that the longlist included three debut novelists for the first time: Perry, White and Kenan Orhan. Beard wrote in the Guardian that she read 163 novels and occasionally picked a slim volume when she needed to get her total up.

The winner receives £50,000. Each of the six shortlisted authors receives £2,500.

What happens next

The winner will be announced on 9 November at Old Billingsgate in London. David Szalay won last year for Flesh.