Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of our judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. The winning book is a work that not only speaks to our current times, but also one that will endure and join the pantheon of great literature. 

The winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership and a life-changing increase in book sales. The winner of the Booker Prize also receives £50,000, with £2,500 awarded to each of the other shortlisted authors.

The longlist for the Booker Prize 2026 was announced on Tuesday, 28 July 2026. The shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event at the Southbank Centre, London on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, which will feature all five judges in conversation. The winning book will be announced on Monday, 9 November 2026 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. 

The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969. Its aim was to stimulate the reading and discussion of contemporary fiction.

The publishers Tom Maschler and Graham C Greene, who came up with the idea for the prize, found a backer in Booker McConnell, a conglomerate with a significant long-term presence in Guyana. The company had recently acquired a commercial interest in literary estates.

Ian Fleming, a good friend and golfing partner of Booker Chairman Jock Campbell, had died in 1964. Before he did, Campbell established an ‘authors’ division’ within Booker, and bought (for £100,000) a 51 per cent share in the profits from worldwide royalties on Fleming’s books. The Booker Authors’ Division would go on to acquire the copyrights of Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer and Harold Pinter, among others.

Thus a prize for writers and readers of the Commonwealth – not just Britain – was born. In 1969, the inaugural Booker Prize was awarded to P.H. Newby for his novel Something to Answer For. Thirty years later, Booker Chairman Michael Caine would write that ‘The Booker Prize can trace its origin, through quirks of history and the imaginativeness of one individual, to James Bond and the attainment of political freedom in Guyana’. (Guyana had gained independence in 1966.)

The life of the Booker Prize over the past half-century has exceeded the imaginings of its founders several times over. The BBC first televised the prize ceremony in 1976, and the level of conversation, competition and controversy increased exponentially in the years that followed. 

In 2014, the prize was opened up to writers of any nationality, as long as their books were written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.