‘It was a meeting none of the judges is likely to forget – getting together to whittle down the 13 extraordinary novels on the longlist to just six. It was fun. Most of these books were beginning to feel like old friends after at least two readings. And it was painful to have to let some of them go, with their now bent spines and dog-eared pages, their brilliant capacity to make us think, argue and sometimes disagree.   

‘We did not start out with a checklist of the different types of book we wanted to see represented in the final six, or the kinds of authors or subject matter. But when we looked at the lineup of our shortlist, neatly propped up against one another, almost glowing, we were happy that we had showcased many of the strengths of contemporary English language fiction. These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated. In them, we meet characters from different countries and different centuries, created by authors 40 years apart, new talent and well-known favourites.  

‘This is writing at its best. There’s plenty to enjoy, some blissful escapism and prose to die for (‘I just wish I could have written that’ kept going through my mind).  But there is also plenty here to change the way we see the world, to surprise us and to challenge our certainties.    

‘We hope that you get as much out of the books on our shortlist as we have.’  

‘I knew it would be almost impossible for the judges to reduce their phenomenal longlist to just six books, and it was. But the prize rules demand a shortlist! These six, which struck the judges strongly the first time they read them and deepened when read again, speak to each other in unexpected ways by virtue of being placed side by side.   

‘Despite the great range in their styles and subjects, in all of these novels we find forms of isolation: relationships breaking down or withheld, people harbouring secrets or pain, characters closing themselves off from others or attempting to reach beyond their solitude towards them. As a collection, this shortlist asks: What can we know of each other, what do we infer or assume, what are we prepared to see?  

‘Sentence by sentence, the writing in every one of them is exceptional. I would recommend this list to any reader: each book, perhaps, for a different state of mind.’  

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.