Booker Prize 2026 longlist nominations includes Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout

Marlon James’ The Disappearers, the Jamaican writer’s first non-fantasy novel since he won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History Of Seven Killings, is already one of 2026’s most anticipated literary releases.

Now the novel, about an anti-gay hate crime in 1980s Jamaica to be released on Sept 1, is likely to be even more so. On July 28, it made the Booker Prize longlist along with a dozen other books, including fellow Booker winner Douglas Stuart’s John Of John and The Things We Never Say by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout.

The Booker, a distinguished British literary award, is given out each year to a title originally written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. The judging panel, led by classicist Mary Beard in 2026, will announce a six-book shortlist on Sept 22. The winner will be named at a ceremony in London on Nov. 9. Its author will receive £50,000 (about $86,000).

Here are the nominees.

The Shadow Of The Object by Chloe Aridjis

In this dreamlike tale, a woman who is hospitalised after being bitten by a dog must return a magic lantern to another patient’s son. John Self, writing in The Financial Times, said that the book had “an intense flavour that can only come from an author’s deep investment in their material”.

Switzy by Emma Cline

Set for an Sept 8 release, Cline’s third novel follows a retired business executive with a degenerative neurological disease as he visits friends and family before his medically assisted death in Zurich.

Helen Of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

The author’s second novel centres on a professor who, after losing his job and partner, heads to the countryside, where he hopes to live a bucolic existence he is not ready for. Jo Hamya, in The Guardian, called it “a perfect fairy tale for our times”.

The End Of Everything by M. John Harrison

A beachcomber pulls a mysterious being from the sand in this science-fiction novel set in a coastal town. John Self, in The Times of London, said that Harrison, 81, “has been writing confounding, brilliant books for more than 50 years”, and that this was another one.

The Disappearers by Marlon James

James’ latest work revolves around eight men in 1980s Jamaica, who respond to a casting call for a play with openly LGBTQ+ themes and are then met with bigotry and violence.

Black Bag by Luke Kennard

This “eccentric, amusingly slanted campus novel”, per Philip Womack in the Times Literary Supplement, reimagines an old academic experiment in which a man attends lectures covered in a black bag, within contemporary academia.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

A Turkish exile living in Italy hires builders to remodel her bathroom – and discovers that they have built a prison cell instead.

May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry

Perry’s novel begins with a curator transforming a former palace to make it look historically accurate, then darts hundreds of years backward into the world of a mediaeval king. Melissa Harrison in The Guardian called it a “highly wrought puzzle-box of a book”.

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

Riley’s latest book recounts the travails of an editor and a contributor to a highbrow magazine after a new executive arrives to shake it up. Christian Lorentzen, in The New York Times, described Riley as a novelist who is “as thoroughly unsentimental as J.M. Coetzee or Michel Houellebecq”.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

A depressed high school history teacher discovers a long-hidden family secret in this story by an author who has been nominated for the Booker twice before, for Oh William! and My Name Is Lucy Barton. Maggie Shipstead, writing in The New York Times, said this latest work “rewards rereading”.

John Of John by Douglas Stuart

A gay man returns to his abusive father’s farm on a Scottish island in the latest work from the author of Shuggie Bain. In The New York Times, Mark Harris called Stuart’s latest work a “moving, suspenseful, completely worth-your-time” book.

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

White’s debut novel is about a Dublin gangster who flees from a feud and then tries to return to a life of crime five years later. Elizabeth Mannion, in The Irish Times, said the novel was “beautifully audacious” and filled with “street lyricism”.

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

An academic befriends a student involved in a culture war controversy in this experimental novel. Ann Manov, in The New York Times, said: “The novel promises a dangerous critique of contemporary sexual and cultural politics, and a narrator who sympathises with the collective enemy; instead, it retreats into metaphor and meteorology.”