Previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart shortlisted for Booker prize

This year’s Booker prize shortlist features immoderate precise acquainted names – erstwhile winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are successful the moving erstwhile more, on with Pulitzer victor Elizabeth Strout and salient British speculative fabrication writer M John Harrison.

Novelist and writer Luke Kennard and debut novelist Rebecca Perry are besides successful contention for the £50,000 prize, the victor of which volition beryllium announced connected Monday 9 November.

James, the Jamaican writer who took location the prize successful 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, was shortlisted this clip for The Disappearers. Set successful Aids-era Jamaica, the caller centres astir an onslaught connected a radical of queer men rehearsing John Herbert’s prison-set play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Coming successful astatine 640 pages, it’s the longest connected the list.

Stuart won successful 2020 for Shuggie Bain; this time, he’s nominated for John of John, which tells the communicative of John-Calum Macleod’s homecoming to the Outer Hebrides. The publication is an “ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, conifer and endure successful silence”, wrote Yagnishsing Dawoor successful a Guardian review.

Strout, who won the 2009 Pulitzer prize for her caller Olive Kitteridge, was antecedently longlisted for the Booker successful 2016 for My Name is Lucy Barton, and shortlisted successful 2022 for Oh William! This year, she is shortlisted for The Things We Never Say, which departs from the well-known formed of characters successful her erstwhile novels to present the past teacher Artie Dam, whose comfy beingness connected the Massachusetts seashore is threatened by a secret, and by the realities of a changing US.

Harrison, who judged the prize successful 2022, is shortlisted for The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic caller acceptable successful an unnamed Kent coastal town. The book, “as its rubric suggests, is astir everything”, wrote Michel Faber in the Guardian. “It burrows heavy into our psyches – into the psyche of our civilisation – and exposes the terrifying insecurity of beingness close now.”

The shortlisted books “took risks”, and they “could not beryllium replicated by artificial quality – these are precise quality books”, said the writer Raymond Antrobus, who is connected this year’s judging sheet alongside the seat Mary Beard, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, the writer Patricia Lockwood, and Guardian writer Rebecca Liu.

Kennard made the database for Black Bag, his comic field caller astir an histrion successful his precocious 30s who takes a occupation involving attending lectures successful a achromatic leather container arsenic portion of a intelligence experiment.

Completing the shortlist is Perry, the sole debut novelist, with May We Feed the King. The publication – which won this year’s Waterstones debut prize – is astir a modern-day curator tasked with dressing rooms successful historical houses, who becomes progressively obsessed with the beingness of a medieval king.

Four of the shortlisted titles are by men, and 3 of them – Black Bag, The Disappearers, and John of John – research masculinity and antheral sexuality. That the shortlisted authors are predominantly antheral is “quite surprising, due to the fact that mostly speaking the male-written books weren’t arsenic bully arsenic the ones written by women”, said Cocker. The masculinity taxable whitethorn travel down to men “having to rethink their role”, helium added. Beard said she doesn’t deliberation it’s a “very masculine” shortlist, portion Lockwood half-joked that “all these books are gay”.

Among the surprises connected the shortlist was the lack of American writer Emma Cline, whose caller Switzy, which follows a antheral suffering from dementia travelling to a euthanasia clinic, received positive reviews crossed the board, amid predictions that it could triumph the wide award. British writer Gwendoline Riley besides failed to marque the chopped with her longlisted caller The Palm House.

The judges said the shortlisting gathering lasted astir 3 hours. The 5 different books that didn’t marque 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.

This year’s prize was unfastened to books published successful the UK oregon Ireland betwixt 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

Last year’s prize was awarded to David Szalay for his caller Flesh. Recent winners see Samantha Harvey for Orbital, Paul Lynch for Prophet Song, and Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.