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Join today<\/a><\/p>\n \n Already a member? It was a dementing process,\u201d says the poet Raymond Antrobus of judging this year\u2019s Booker Prize<\/a>, the winner of which will be announced on 9 November. \u201cI lost my mind quite a few times.\u201d It\u2019s not a total surprise. Insanity is just one of several responses someone might have to the mammoth task of reading 163 books in seven months, a figure that shakes out to roughly 23 books a month, or roughly three quarters of a book a day. <\/p>\n That, though, is what a Booker judge signs up for. It\u2019s the cost of joining a league that counts Iris Murdoch and Salman Rushdie in its number, and the price you pay for helping to decide who will win one of the most prestigious prizes in the world. Author Patricia Lockwood, a former Booker Prize shortlistee herself and a fellow 2026 judge, was hesitant about serving on the panel. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until my husband said he would read all the books along with me that I was for sure a yes \u2013 I thought what a wonderful way to ruin his life for a year!\u201d she laughs. More seriously, she adds, it was nice to have a comrade in what \u201ccan be a fairly lonely, isolating process\u201d. <\/p>\n Joining Lockwood and Antrobus on the judging panel this year are Pulp rocker Jarvis Cocker, literary critic Rebecca Liu, and classicist Mary Beard. Together they whittled down 163 books to a longlist of 13<\/a> before whittling that down further to a shortlist of six titles<\/a>: M John Harrison\u2019s unsettling sci-fi novel The End of Everything, Marlon James\u2019s Jamaica-set novel The Disappearers, Luke Kennard\u2019s campus comedy Black Bag, Rebecca Perry\u2019s timeline-shuttling debut May We Feed The King, Elizabeth Strout\u2019s 11th novel, The Things We Never Say, and the multigenerational epic John of John by Douglas Stuart. <\/p>\n It has been a long road to get here, and a gruelling one, too. In a time of dwindling attention spans and plummeting reading rates, getting through one book a month may now be admirable. Twenty-three? Unthinkable. Lockwood says that it was \u201ca matter of muscling through at certain points\u201d \u2013 and required some trial and error on her part to find the most effective way of achieving her goal of one book a day. \u201cIf you did it first thing in the morning, you felt like you were making headway, but it actually turned out to be better to read in the afternoon so it didn\u2019t consume the entire day\u2019s work,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n Antrobus, meanwhile, pulled on his former life as a competitive swimmer. \u201cWhen you\u2019re training for time trials, it\u2019s very regimented: you know what your best time is and what your best stroke is, but you\u2019re still trying to beat yourself. So it got to a point where I knew what my reading time was and I knew what conditions I needed to improve my reading and so I was able to modulate that,\u201d he says. \u201cI knew that if I had done 50 pages before nine o\u2019clock then I was in a good spot, and if not, it was go, go go!\u201d <\/p>\n Optimal reading conditions for Antrobus meant two things: enough sleep and a liquid diet. \u201cI didn\u2019t eat for the first seven hours of the day, nothing that will suck the blood out of my brain\u2026 I ate a lot of soup.\u201d <\/p>\n For both of them, it meant learning to put a book down when they knew it wasn\u2019t right. \u201cIt was not going to be physically possible to read them all the way through,\u201d says Lockwood. Antrobus read the first batch of 40 novels back to front \u2013 \u201cthat\u2019s when I lost my mind\u201d \u2013 before giving himself permission to come to a judgement sooner. Lockwood remembers something Wood told her and her fellow judges: \u201cThis is a treasure hunt. It\u2019s not a punishment in hell.\u201d It was certainly advice worth bearing in mind when staring down the barrel of 87 books and a ticking clock. <\/p>\n That Antrobus has a toddler certainly didn\u2019t help with the workload. \u201cI was really almost burning out at one point,\u201d he says. As if on cue, his son, who is home sick from school, calls for his dad off-screen. \u201cI had to go back to the Booker directors because there was a point when I was really struggling, but they were great at advising me on the experiences of other judges who had also been parents and how they\u2019d gotten through it, and told me that everything I was saying was completely normal, which is all I needed. I just needed to know that I wasn\u2019t insane.\u201d <\/p>\n Of course, pretty much everything else had to fall to the wayside. Antrobus hit pause on his teaching duties, while Lockwood found herself totally incapable of enjoying her hobbies. \u201cI take a metalsmithing class, but I found that while I was reading the books, I couldn\u2019t design anything! I couldn\u2019t come up with any concepts because my brain was so much in that reading place,\u201d she says, joking, \u201cI would try to make a ring and it would turn out as a book!\u201d <\/p>\n She did, though, continue her own writing, which included a piece for LRB about the early 20th-century American author Willa Cather \u2013 who proved a harsh but helpful litmus test for the Booker hopefuls. \u201cYour main takeaway is, \u2018Wow, Willa Cather was a very good writer because some people are really not,\u2019\u201d says Lockwood. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to see the contrast of a person who is a dead legend with people who might be on their first book, or toiling in the midlist range for a long time.\u201d <\/p>\n What order the books should be read in posed another question. Mary Beard, the classicist and chair of the judging panel, tackled the titles in alphabetical order. Lockwood\u2019s approach was more instinctual. \u201cI would just pick up the book for a day and hope it wasn\u2019t too depressing,\u201d she says. \u201cYou know, there was a lot of dementia, a lot of drowning and so you were really happy sometimes when you got a book that you could read in a few hours straight through that wasn\u2019t necessarily going to put you in a darker or drearier headspace because that became wearying at times.\u201d <\/p>\n As for the deliberations themselves \u2013 of which there were nine, some virtual, some in person. Things could get heated. Not for nothing did Philip Larkin, a judge back in 1977, say the meetings made him want to throw himself out of the window. No threats of defenestration were made this time around, but certainly there were \u201ctussles\u201d, as Antrobus calls them. <\/p>\n Think 12 Angry Men, the 1957 legal drama about a hung jury in a murder trial, says Lockwood. \u201cI was literally like the guy in that, I was using a lot of gestures, I was leaping up. I was doing a lot of physical persuasion. And that part was really fun because it\u2019s not something I\u2019ll do for my own work.\u201d This isn\u2019t to say the loudest voice was always the most persuasive. \u201cNot every rousing, passionate \u2018Captain, My Captain\u2019 speech resulted in a book ending up on the list,\u201d says Antrobus. \u201cCompromises were made across the board \u2013 but we ended up in a place where everyone was like, \u2018OK, we can live with this. We\u2019re happy with this list.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n As reading\u2019s premier proponents right now, do Lockwood and Antrobus have any words of advice for anyone looking to reignite their love of reading? \u201cThere is so much chatter about how it\u2019s so difficult and how our attention spans have shortened, but it\u2019s something that comes back within a week or two if you\u2019re really diligent about it,\u201d says Lockwood. \u201cPut your phone in the other room, pick up a book, get a notebook and you\u2019ll find yourself approaching that earlier style of reading that we\u2019re looking back on so nostalgically now, but I think with some truth as well.\u201d <\/p>\n For Antrobus, he simply points to the satisfaction you get as a reward for your efforts. \u201cI could actually feel the tingle of my brain turning on\u2026 the neurons shifting away from that mindset of checking Instagram all the time,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it was so rewarding. If you can really sit with this story and the language and atmosphere and feeling, you come out and you think, \u2018Wow, that was so nourishing.\u2019\u201d It\u2019s a feeling Antrobus and his fellow judges hope readers will get from diving into this year\u2019s winner \u2013 the announcement of which is just around the corner, on Monday 9 November. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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The Booker Prize 2026 judges pictured with the 13 books on their longlist (Neo Gilder for the Booker Prize Foundation)<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Booker-Prize-Longlist-2026.jpeg\")
The Booker Prize longlist 2026 (Booker Prize Foundation)<\/p>\n