‘It’s been an extraordinary seven months. The five Booker judges have each read 163 books, discussed and debated them, and sometimes re-read them, to whittle them down to a longlist of just 13. I would not be telling the truth if I said that I hadn’t occasionally felt daunted, as a new box of 30 or so gleaming volumes landed on my doorstep. (Just think: if you include the re-reading and the occasional day off, you have to average a book a day to get through the total.) But what I shall most remember is the eye-opening pleasure of it all, and what I learnt about reading and the power of fiction from my fellow judges. I’ve also felt increasingly humbled by the novels and the novelists themselves. I have come away with huge admiration for anyone who can craft a work of fiction from start to finish.  

‘Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock. And they are set anywhere and everywhere: Ireland and Italy, Mexico and Massachusetts, Jamaica and the Hebrides, universities, private planes and pubs, past, present and future. But there’s one thing they all share. Every writer on our longlist brilliantly musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds.  

‘Books are not mirrors: they don’t simply reflect ourselves back to us. One of the many important things about fiction is that it helps us see what it might be like not to be us, to begin to understand the perspectives of others, and to imagine what it might be like to see the world differently. Great books are not cosy. In their various ways, the novels we have chosen are (we hope) dynamite.’ 

‘I’m delighted to have witnessed this year’s erudite, entertaining judges in action over the course of this year. Their range of tastes, openness of mind and rich discussions have resulted in a list that shows how capacious an art form the novel is. Whether working in a traditional form or stretching its possibilities, these writers can take you to the edge of a world or a thought or a feeling. There are books here that are funny, books that are pacey, books that are bold, books that will move you to tears. The 2026 longlist rewards risk: it is full of genuinely original work, and has human fingerprints all over it.’ 

Mary Beard (Chair)

Mary Beard is one of Britain’s best-known classicists. She is a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and was a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, where she taught for more than 30 years. 

Beard has written numerous books on the Ancient World, including the 2008 Wolfson Prize-winner, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and the recent Emperor of Rome. These books – along with the bestselling Women & Power – have been published to critical and popular acclaim and translated all over the world. 

She is a broadcaster and commentator, appearing regularly on radio and television, including on programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. She has written and presented radio and television documentaries for the BBC on Ancient Rome – from Pompeii to Caligula to ‘forbidden art’. She was a presenter for the BBC Civilisations series, and has recently entered the podcast arena, co-hosting a weekly podcast, Instant Classics, with Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins. 

She is Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and writes a blog, A Don’s Life, selections from which have been published in book form. In 2013 she published Confronting the Classics, a collection of essays and reviews written over the last 20 years for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.  

Beard, who is currently a Trustee of the British Museum, was made a Dame in 2018. Her new book, Talking Classics, will be published in April 2026. 

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus is a British-Jamaican poet, educator, and writer. He was diagnosed as deaf at age six; his work explores themes of sound, language, identity, and memory.

Antrobus is the author of several poetry collections, including Shapes & Disfigurements (2012), To Sweeten Bitter (2017), The Perseverance (2018), All The Names Given (2021), and Signs, Music (2024). His poems have been published in The New Yorker, the Guardian, Granta, the London Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Poetry Foundation, Lit Hub, and The Deaf Poets Society. His work has also appeared on BBC 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and Channel 4. 

In 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. He has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian Poetry Book of the Year 2018, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. He has also been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Forward Prize. His poems ‘Jamaican British’, ‘The Perseverance’, ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ and ‘With Birds You’re Never Lonely’ have been added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus.  

His debut picture book, Can Bears Ski?, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, was selected as an Ezra Jack Keats honouree winner in 2021. That same year Antrobus hosted the BBC Radio 4 documentary, Inventions in Sounds, and performed at the Paralympic Homecoming ceremony at Wembley Stadium. In 2025 his first art installation was shown at the Barbican as part of the exhibition ‘Feel The Sound’, and he published a highly-acclaimed memoir, The Quiet Ear. 

Antrobus has served as an ambassador for The Poetry School and Arts Emergency, and was a board member of English PEN. Currently, he advocates for D/deaf charities, including Deaf Kidz International, the National Deaf Children’s Society and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed MBE for services to literature in 2021. 

Jarvis Cocker

Jarvis Cocker is a musician and broadcaster from the north of England. He formed the band Pulp in 1978, whilst at secondary school. The band went on to become one of the most successful UK music groups of the 1990s. 

Between 2009 and 2017 he presented the BBC Radio 6 Music programme Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service, as well as the ongoing, award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series Wireless Nights. He has interviewed authors including Salman Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, Nick Hornby and Miranda July. He was an editor-at-large at Faber between 2012 and 2014. 

Cocker has honorary doctorates from both Sheffield Hallam University and Central Saint Martin’s School of Art (which he attended from 1988 to 1991). 

His lyric collection Mother, Brother, Lover was published by Faber in 2011. Good Pop, Bad Pop, his first work of long-form prose, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. 

Cocker appeared in a Booker Prize 2022 shortlist film, performing an extract from Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. 

Rebecca Liu

Rebecca Liu is a writer, critic, and editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine. Her essays and criticism about books and arts have been published in the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, the White Review, and Critical Quarterly – to which she contributed an essay on John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G. for the John Berger centenary issue. 

Liu has interviewed writers including Bernardine Evaristo, Xiaolu Guo, Kiley Reid, and Jacqueline Rose, and artists including Park Chan-wook, Carly Rae Jepsen, Darren Star, and Sandra Oh. She chairs literary events, often for the UK’s East and Southeast Asian Literary Festival, and has discussed books and arts on BBC radio programmes. 

Liu was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Auckland and Hong Kong before studying history and east Asian studies at the University of Chicago, and political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. 

She was previously assistant editor at Prospect magazine, and produced and co-hosted the Prospect podcast, where she interviewed authors including Natasha Brown, Avni Doshi, and Amia Srinivasan. She was also previously a staff critic at Another Gaze film journal, and an editor at the King’s Review magazine. 

Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood is an American novelist, poet and essayist. Lockwood’s books include the novel No One Is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2021, and was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021.

Her other books are the memoir Priestdaddy, one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017; and the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. 

Lockwood’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. Her most recent novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, was published in 2025. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.