Mary Beard announced as Chair of judges for the Booker Prize 2026
The judges for the Booker Prize 2026 are announced today, Thursday, 11 December, as the prize opens for submissions from publishers
Celebrated classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard chairs the judging panel and is joined by award-winning poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood.
The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction. It has celebrated world-class talent for over 55 years, shaping the canon of 20th and 21st century literature.
This year’s judges are looking for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced on Tuesday, 28 July 2026, with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the Booker Prize 2026 will be announced in November, and will receive £50,000, as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.
The Booker Prize 2026 judges
Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges, comments:
‘I’m hugely looking forward to being part of the Booker team this year, and to getting down to business with my excellent fellow judges. Along with the excitement is a little apprehension – not least because, like many people, I’m quite a slow reader, so will have to learn how to speed up a bit!
‘The Booker is a celebration of fiction and fiction-writers in all their wondrous variety, and of their tremendous power to make us think differently about the world. But it is also a celebration of reading and readers, in all their wondrous variety: at their library desk, on the train, curled up in bed; the quick and the slow; the confident and the puzzled. It’s a celebration of the impact that words have on us all.’
Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges
© Robin CormackGaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds:
‘So much contemporary fiction is based on history, or inspired by myth, that Booker Prize judges often find themselves asking: What is a novel’s role in relation to the past? What can the imagination do with facts? These questions offer ways to think about fiction of all kinds, and I’m delighted that the distinguished and much-loved classical scholar Mary Beard has agreed to steer this year’s panel.
‘It’s a stellar group altogether: Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood each have a different feel for words and have each contributed something unique to the culture at large. I’m hugely looking forward to witnessing their alchemy as literary sparring partners, and, eventually, to sharing their choices with the world. I have no doubt that in reading together they will make the best books emerge even better.’
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation
© Clara MoldenAbout the judges
Mary Beard (Chair of Booker Prize 2026 judges) 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. She 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. They – and the best-selling Women & Power – have been published to critical and popular acclaim and translated all over the world.
She is a regular broadcaster and commentator on radio and television, on programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, and 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 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.
He 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 he 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.
Raymond Antrobus, Booker Prize 2026 judge
© Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri FoundationJarvis Cocker is a musician and broadcaster from the north of England. He formed the band Pulp in 1978, whilst at secondary school. They went on to become one of the most successful UK 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. He appeared in a Booker Prize 2022 shortlist film performing an extract from Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.
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, Prospect magazine, 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. She 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.
She 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 is an American novelist, poet and essayist. Her 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; 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.
Her 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 earlier this year. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Jarvis Cocker, Booker Prize 2026 judge
© Tom JacksonThe prize’s impact
The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. Authors shortlisted for the prize gain global readerships and an increase in profile and sales, and the winner can expect their career to be transformed.
The winner of the 2025 prize, Flesh by David Szalay, sold over 7,900 hardback copies in the UK in the week following its win on 10 November, a 1,441% week-on-week sales increase, with combined Ebook and audiobook sales in the same week totalling 15,000 copies, representing a 2,508% increase. The publisher Jonathan Cape immediately re-printed 150,000 copies of Flesh in response to the win. It reached number four in the Sunday Times bestsellers chart, number one in the Times, and entered the Amazon fiction Top 20 Most Sold list for the first time in the week after its win, entering at number two. It topped the Independent Bookshop Top 20 the following week. It has now sold over 37,000 print copies in the UK, with combined digital sales totalling over 40,000. Rights deals increased from 12 before Flesh’s longlisting to a total of 35 territories now either sold or under offer.
Publisher submissions
UK and Irish publishers are now invited to submit their books for the 2026 prize. Rules and submission guidelines are available here. Key deadlines are staggered between 26 January and 30 March 2026.
David Szalay, winner of the Booker Prize 2025, at the ceremony
© David Parry for the Booker Prize FoundationFor media enquiries, please contact:
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