Winner
The Booker Prize 2026
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison won the 2026 Booker Prize, announced on 9 November. It beat five other shortlisted novels.
Everything about the prize is on the Booker Prizes' own site.
The Booker Prize has been awarded every year since 1969 for the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Until 2013 only Commonwealth and Irish writers could win it, and since 2014 it has been open to writers of any nationality. The winner gets £50,000 and each shortlisted author £2,500. This year’s judges had 163 novels to choose from, all published between October 2025 and September 2026. They named a longlist of 13 on 28 July and cut it to six on 22 September.
The six shortlisted books
The shortest are The End of Everything and The Things We Never Say at 208 pages; the longest is The Disappearers at 640.
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| Title | Author | Pages | Setting | UK publisher |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The End of Everything Winner | M. John Harrison | 208 | Britain after an unexplained catastrophe; the Channel coast | Serpent's Tail |
| Black Bag | Luke Kennard | 400 | London; a university lecture hall | John Murray |
| John of John | Douglas Stuart | 416 | Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, late 1990s | Pan Macmillan |
| May We Feed the King | Rebecca Perry | 272 | A medieval royal court and a present-day museum | Granta |
| The Disappearers | Marlon James | 640 | Kingston, Jamaica, 1988 | Hamish Hamilton |
| The Things We Never Say | Elizabeth Strout | 208 | A coastal Massachusetts town, summer and autumn 2024 | Viking |
Pages and publishers are the UK first editions, in hardback.
What stands out in 2026
Two former winners are back on the shortlist: Marlon James, who won in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Douglas Stuart, who won in 2020 with Shuggie Bain. Before this year, only four authors had won the Booker twice.
Elizabeth Strout is shortlisted for the second time; the first was Oh William! in 2022. At the other end, May We Feed the King is Rebecca Perry’s first novel, and it has already won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Black Bag is Luke Kennard’s second. He is a poet, and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2021. M. John Harrison is already on our lists: his 2002 novel Light is on the Guardian’s 100 best books of the 21st century.
The judging panel is chaired by Mary Beard and includes Jarvis Cocker.
What the lists already say about these authors
Four of the six authors already have books on our lists: M. John Harrison, Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout and Douglas Stuart. For the other two, this is their first appearance.
| Author | Earlier books on our lists |
|---|---|
| M. John Harrison |
|
| Luke Kennard | None yet: Black Bag is their first book on our lists |
| Douglas Stuart |
|
| Rebecca Perry | None yet: May We Feed the King is their first book on our lists |
| Marlon James |
|
| Elizabeth Strout |
|
Could a former winner win again?
A former winner has been back on the Booker shortlist 27 times since 1969, and won 4 of those times: J. M. Coetzee (1999), Peter Carey (2001), Hilary Mantel (2012) and Margaret Atwood (2019).
J. G. Farrell's 1973 win isn't counted as a return: his earlier win, for Troubles, is the Lost Man Booker for novels of 1970, only awarded in 2010.
Four authors have won the Booker twice, most recently Margaret Atwood in 2019
Which one to read first
If you want something short and strange, start with The End of Everything: 208 pages of a Britain where nobody explains what went wrong, short enough for a sitting or two. Black Bag is the funny one, about an out-of-work actor who spends a university term inside a bag.
The Things We Never Say is the quiet, close one, about a family that has stopped saying what it means, and it’s 208 pages too. For a big read to sink into, choose between The Disappearers (640 pages, Kingston in 1988, often violent) and John of John (416 pages, a family croft on the Isle of Harris).
May We Feed the King is something different: a medieval king and a modern museum curator side by side, in a poet’s first novel that rewards slow reading.
Who judged it
The 2026 judges were Mary Beard (chair), Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood.
Winners and shortlists from the prize's own record. Every Booker Prize winner, year by year
Lists used on this page
- The 100 best books of the 21st century, The Guardian (2019). Original list
- The 100 best books of the 21st century, The New York Times (2024). Original list
- Booker Prize (winners and shortlists), Booker Prize Foundation (1969-). Original list
- Women's Prize for Fiction (winners and shortlists), Women's Prize Trust (1996-). Original list
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (winners and finalists), Columbia University (1918-). Original list
- British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year (winners and shortlists), The Bookseller (1990-). Original list
- National Book Award for Fiction (winners and finalists), National Book Foundation (1950-). Original list
- The Big Jubilee Read, BBC Arts and The Reading Agency (2022). Original list