The Booker Prize 2026

The 2026 judging panel for the Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction, has been announced

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 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 on Tuesday, 22 September. The winner of the Booker Prize 2026 will be announced on Monday, 9 November. The winning author will receive £50,000, while each of the six shortlisted authors receives £2,500.

Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges, says:

‘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 Cormack*

Gaby 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 Molden*

The 2026 judges

Raymond Antrobus

Mary Beard

Jarvis Cocker

Rebecca Liu

Patricia Lockwood

About the judges

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.

Fiction gives us a chance to see the world differently – complex, awry, funny and tragic, and from someone else’s standpoint

— Mary Beard

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.

Storytelling is the oldest artform of our species. Fiction expands our world while narrowing the connection between us. I think our collective survival depends on it and great fiction has to know how strange and seriously funny that is

— Raymond Antrobus

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.

Great fiction makes you see the world through someone else’s eyes. It’s a holiday inside a stranger’s head. It can bring life back to… life

— Jarvis Cocker

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.

I love fiction that makes the world feel large, wonderful and surprising, or even absurd, weird and depraved – and in doing so, captures something true about what it is to be alive

— Rebecca Liu

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.

Great fiction to me: a habitable place, with its own elements, language, customs, time zone. Also, happily, a land where paragraphs like this cannot be produced

— Patricia Lockwood