The Booker Prize, initially named after sponsor company Booker, McConnell Ltd, was established in 1969 has become one of the world’s richest literary awards.
Previous winners have included Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Salman Rushdie, Kingsley Amis, Peter Carey, Pat Barker, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, and Hilary Mantel.
Originally it was only open to novels written in English by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) authors, but in 2014 was opened up to all English-language fiction books.
This year’s longlist, the so-called ‘Booker’s Dozen, has now been announced, chosen by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by celebrated classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard, alongside 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 longlist transports readers from a hospital in Mexico City to the Kent seaside in a post-apocalyptic Britain to an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich, from the barren hillsides of the Outer Hebrides to the criminal badlands of West Dublin, from Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1980s to coastal Massachusetts in the run up to the 2024 US election, from an unnamed medieval court to a prison cell that defies explanation.
The shortlist will be announced on 22 September, before the winner is announced at a ceremony on November 9.
Here are all 13 novels in the running - and what they are about.
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1. Chloe Aridjis: The Shadow of the Object
"Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered." | Contributed
2. Emma Cline: Switzy
"A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. In his pocket is a notebook filled with urgent reminders ― but he can no longer read his own handwriting. He’s travelling with his assistant. There will be a stopover in London, dinner with his adult daughter, a meeting in France with an old friend. His final destination: a clinic in Zurich. As David glides through hotel rooms, airports and foreign cities, his grasp on the present slips away and the past rushes in." | Contributed
3. Makenna Goodman: Helen of Nowhere
"In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his story is not actually over – rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated." | Contributed
4. M. John Harrison: 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 obscure. 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." | Contributed