{"id":779400,"date":"2026-09-23T00:00:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T00:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779400\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T00:00:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T00:00:15","slug":"previous-winners-marlon-james-and-douglas-stuart-shortlisted-for-booker-prize-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779400\/","title":{"rendered":"Previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart shortlisted for Booker prize | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s Booker prize shortlist features some very familiar names \u2013 previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are in the running once more, along with Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout<\/a> 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 \u00a350,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on Monday 9 November.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Set in Aids-era Jamaica, the novel centres around an attack on a group of queer men rehearsing John Herbert\u2019s prison-set play Fortune and Men\u2019s Eyes. Coming in at 640 pages, it\u2019s the longest on the list.<\/p>\n

Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain; this time, he\u2019s nominated for John of John, which tells the story of John-Calum Macleod\u2019s homecoming to the Outer Hebrides. The book is an \u201cardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence\u201d, wrote Yagnishsing Dawoor in a Guardian review<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quick GuideThe Booker prize 2026 shortlistShow<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cas its title suggests, is about everything\u201d, wrote Michel Faber in the Guardian<\/a>. \u201cIt burrows deep into our psyches \u2013 into the psyche of our civilisation \u2013 and exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shortlisted books \u201ctook risks\u201d, and they \u201ccould not be replicated by artificial intelligence \u2013 these are very human books\u201d, said the writer Raymond Antrobus, who is on this year\u2019s judging panel alongside the chair Mary Beard, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, the writer Patricia Lockwood, and Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu.<\/p>\n

Kennard made the list for Black Bag<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Completing the shortlist is Perry, the sole debut novelist, with May We Feed the King<\/a>. The book \u2013 which won this year\u2019s Waterstones debut prize<\/a> \u2013 is about a modern-day curator tasked with dressing rooms in historic houses, who becomes increasingly obsessed with the life of a medieval king.<\/p>\n

Four of the shortlisted titles are by men, and three of them \u2013 Black Bag, The Disappearers, and John of John \u2013 explore masculinity and male sexuality. That the shortlisted authors are predominantly male is \u201cquite surprising, because generally speaking the male-written books weren\u2019t as good as the ones written by women\u201d, said Cocker. The masculinity theme may come down to men \u201chaving to rethink their role\u201d, he added. Beard said she doesn\u2019t think it\u2019s a \u201cvery masculine\u201d shortlist, while Lockwood half-joked that \u201call these books are gay\u201d.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> across the board, amid predictions<\/a> that it could win the overall award. British author Gwendoline Riley also failed to make the cut with her longlisted novel The Palm House.<\/p>\n

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The judges said the shortlisting meeting lasted approximately three hours. The five other books that didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s prize was open to books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s prize was awarded to David Szalay for his novel Flesh<\/a>. Recent winners include Samantha Harvey for Orbital<\/a>, Paul Lynch for Prophet Song<\/a>, and Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Explore the shortlist for this year\u2019s Booker prize and, for a limited time, get all six books for only \u00a379 at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s Booker prize shortlist features some very familiar names \u2013 previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-779400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}