Lights, camera, action. 

Since 2022, the Booker Prize Foundation has created a series of six two-minute films for its two annual adult fiction prizes. Each series features well-known actors and artists performing extracts from the books shortlisted for the prize.

The award-winning films, released in spring and autumn, have become highlights of the prizes. The Booker Prize 2025 and Bukhman International Booker Prize 2026 films have been viewed online over a combined 132 million times. The films are award-winners themselves: the shorts produced for the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist, directed by Sasha Nathwani, won a Webby Award in the Social – Arts and Entertainment category and a Brand Film Award for Best Use of Digital/Social Media, whilst the Booker Prize 2022 films, directed by Kevin Thomas, won the Culture category of The Drum Awards for Marketing EMEA 2023.

The Booker Prize 2026 shortlisted books and the performers reading the extracts are as follows: 

• The End of Everything by M. John Harrison – read by Kathryn Hunter
• The Disappearers by Marlon James – read by Paterson Joseph
• Black Bag by Luke Kennard – read by Himesh Patel
• May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry – read by Savannah Steyn
• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout – read by Maxine Peake
• John of John by Douglas Stuart – read by Lewis Gribben 

Holly Blakey, director of the Booker Prize 2026 shortlist films, says: 

‘I loved coming back to make the Booker Prizes films for a second time. This year we wanted to push the visual language somewhere new, shooting much of it outside and finding something looser, more textural and alive in the process. It was less about narrativising the books for me, more about searching for the feelings they leave you with – fear, humour, the great voids between us, or something altogether more existential. Each film had its own distinct world, shaped by the book and the performer, and it was a real joy finding those different notes with such an extraordinary group of actors.’ 

John of John:

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled. John of John confirms Douglas Stuart as one of the great British writers at work today.

Lewis Gribben:

Lewis Gribben is an award-winning actor. He was selected as one of Screen International’s ‘Rising Star Scotland’ and his breakthrough came leading Channel 4’s Somewhere Boy, which earned him the BAFTA Scotland Best Actor award.  

Gribben stars in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror Season 7 on Netflix as well as in Charlotte Regan’s Mint for the BBC and can be seen in feature films The Damned, from director Thordur Palsson, and The Severed Sun, from director Dean Puckett. 

Gribben’s other notable credits include Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air, Ben Wheatley’s Generation Z, and Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting. He will star opposite Hunter Schafer and Michelle Yeoh in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2099 for Prime Video. 

The Disappearers:

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: all of them are gay – a ‘batty man’ in Jamaican argot – and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.

One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical: as their bodies heal, each man must grapple with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.

The Disappearers is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

Paterson Joseph:

Paterson Joseph is an actor and author working across film, television and theatre.  

He starred in the feature film They Will Kill You opposite Zazie Beetz and Patricia Arquette and in Wonka alongside Timothée Chalamet, as well as the BBC series Boat Story and Vigil. Other on-screen credits include Noughts and Crosses, Peep Show, In the Name of the Father and The Beach. 

On stage, Joseph’s theatre credits include A Christmas Carol (Old Vic), The Last Days of Don Juan (RSC) and Elmina’s Kitchen (National Theatre). He is the author of a play (Sancho – An Act of Remembrance), a novel (The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho) and two works of non-fiction (Julius Caesar and Me and Ten: Children Who Changed the World). 

Joseph has recently wrapped on Amazon Prime’s Tomb Raider, alongside Sophie Turner and on Raine Allen-Miller’s next feature film The Roots Manoeuvre. 

The End of Everything:

Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscured. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.

Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.

A slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the acknowledged master of science fiction.

Kathryn Hunter:

Kathryn Hunter is an Olivier Award-winning actor and director working across film, television, and theatre. 

She received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Her recent film work includes Ladies First, Poor Things, Megalopolis, The Front Room &amp and Vicious, alongside acclaimed performances in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Orlando, and All or Nothing.  

On television, her credits include the BBC’s Ann Droid, Netflix’s Black Doves, Andor and Grotesquerie, both on Disney+, and HBO’s Landscapers.  

Hunter’s distinguished stage career spans major international venues. Notable productions include The Benghal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, The Valley of Astonishment and Kafka’s Monkey (all Young Vic), King Lear (Shakespeare’s Globe), The Chairs (Almeida Theatre) and The Visit (Théâtre de Complicité), for which she won the Olivier Award for Best Actress. 

Black Bag: 

A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? 

The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor’s childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation…

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

Himesh Patel:

Himesh Patel is an Emmy-nominated actor working across film and television. 

Following his acting debut on BBC’s EastEnders, he has worked with leading directors, featuring in Danny Boyle’s Yesterday, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and The Odyssey and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up.  

He has also starred in the BBC’s television adaptation of the Booker Prize 2013 winner The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, alongside Eva Green and Eve Hewson and HBO Max post-apocalyptic drama Station Eleven, which he received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Recent credits include leading the HBO satire The Franchise and starring in the psychological drama The Assessment, alongside Elizabeth Olsen and Alicia Vikander, and in Netflix sequel Enola Holmes 3. 

Patel is a contributing author on the essay collection The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and is co-writing the film adaptation of Shukla’s memoir Brown Baby. He is on the TIME100 Next 2026: The World’s Most Influential Rising Stars list. 

The Things We Never Say: 

Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad – at himself and the people around him – and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?

And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear – and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.

With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets.

Maxine Peake:

Four-time BAFTA nominee Maxine Peake is an actor, director and writer working across film, television and theatre.

Peake’s film credits include the multi award-winning I Swear, Words of War, Peterloo, The Theory of Everything and Funny Cow (on which Peake served as Executive Producer through her company, Vexed Pixie). On television, Peake’s credits include BBC’s Silk, Netflix’s Black Mirror: Metalhead, BBC’s Three Girls, Channel 4’s Shameless, Hulu/Channel 4’s The Bisexual, ITV’s Anne, and BBC’s The Village. 

Notable stage performances include Hamlet (Royal Exchange), The Welkin (National Theatre), Avalanche (Barbican) and The Last Stand of Mary Whitehouse (Nottingham Playhouse), for which she was nominated for a 2026 WhatsOnStage Award for Best Performer in a Play. 

Peake lately starred in Last Seen for Apple TV, FX/Disney+’s Say Nothing, and she will soon be seen co-starring in Berlin Noir (also for Apple TV). 2027 will see Peake starring in Michaela Coel’s highly anticipated new show First Day on Earth for BBC/HBO and in Netflix/Warp Films series The Unheard, alongside Kate Winslet. 

May We Feed the King:

She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.

He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn’t long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.

May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. 

Savannah Steyn: 

Savannah Steyn is an actor and graduate of The Brit School, National Youth Theatre and Guildhall.

Steyn played a key supporting role opposite Stephen Graham in Good Boy, which premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. She also features in HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, in Phil Allocco’s feature film 5 Lbs of Pressure alongside Luke Evans, in Paramount’s box office hit Crawl and in Oprah Winfrey’s HULU series Black Cake. 

Steyn is currently starring as one of the leads opposite Hannah Waddingham, Octavia Spencer and Bill Nighy in Amazon’s hit action-adventure comedy series, RIDE OR DIE.