Authors Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are contenders to join a select group of writers who have won the Booker Prize twice, after both were named on the 2026 shortlist announced earlier this week. The shortlist, revealed on September 22, features six titles chosen from an original list of 163 submissions. Judges described the selected works as “moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful.”
The Booker Prize, established in 1969, honors the best long-form fiction written in English by authors of any nationality, provided their work is published in Britain or Ireland during the eligibility period, which this year runs from October 2025 to September 2026. The prize carries a £50,000 award and a trophy named Iris, in tribute to 1978 winner Iris Murdoch.
Marlon James is shortlisted for *The Disappeared*, a novel depicting the lives of gay men facing hostility in 1980s Jamaica. James previously won the prize in 2015 for *A Brief History of Seven Killings*. Douglas Stuart’s *John of John* explores father-son relationships on a remote Scottish island; Stuart earned the Booker in 2020 with *Shuggie Bain*. A victory for either author would make them only the fifth writers to receive the Booker Prize twice, joining J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood.
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is also among the contenders with *The Things We Never Say*, a poignant narrative set in a small New England town. Strout was previously a Booker finalist in 2022 for *Oh William!* and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009 for *Olive Kitteridge*.
The remaining shortlisted authors include British writer Rebecca Perry with *May We Feed the King*, a tale spanning medieval and modern times; 81-year-old M. John Harrison, whose post-apocalyptic novel *The End of Everything* could make him the oldest recipient of the prize; and Luke Kennard, with the campus satire *Black Bag*. Notably, this is only the second time in a decade that male authors outnumber female authors on the Booker shortlist.
Mary Beard, historian and chair of the judging panel, expressed the difficulty of narrowing the longlist, noting the emotional connection the judges formed with the books after multiple readings. The panel also included musician Jarvis Cocker and American novelist Patricia Lockwood, who highlighted the diversity of tone and subject matter among the shortlisted works, describing them as ranging from “hilarious to discomfiting” and “powerfully shocking to intriguingly understated.”
The winner of the 2026 Booker Prize will be announced on November 9. Last year’s award went to Hungarian-British author David Szalay for his novel *Flesh*.