Douglas Stuart makes Booker shortlist with John of John
The Glasgow-born writer took the Booker in 2020 - can he do it again in 2026?
Author Douglas Stuart has made the shortlist of the 2026 Booker Prize for his third novel John of John.
The shortlist success of Stuart, originally from Glasgow, comes after he took the overall prize in 2020 for his classic Shuggie Bain.
John of John is set on the Isle of Harris, where Stuart spent months researching his latest novel while waiting for publication of his first.
It tells of the homecoming of protagonist, Cal, against a backdrop of repressed love, secrets and religious fervour, with a father-and-son dynamic straining at the heart of the story.
Stuart has made the ‘Booker Six’ alongside authors Marlon James, who won the prize in 2015 with his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.
This year, it is James’ The Disappearers that makes the shortlist, with his latest novel homing in on a group of gay men in Jamaica in the 1980s.
If either James or Stuart win, they would be the fifth author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice, joining J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
Also featuring on the 2026 shortlist is The End Of Everything by M John Harrison, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry and The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Strout is a Pulitzer prize-winner and three-time Booker Prize nominee who made the shortlist in in 2016 for My Name Is Lucy Barton and shortlisted in 2022 for Oh William!
Harrison, 81, who has been nominated for The End Of Everything, could become the oldest winner in the prize’s history.
He is an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer best known for the Viriconium series Climbers and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy.
Set in post-apocalyptic Britain, on the Kent coast, his novel follows beachcomber Phillip Tennent as he discovers a new artefact he must keep to himself before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
The title of the oldest winner in the history of the prize is currently held by Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she won the 2019 prize for The Testaments.
Perry has been recognised for her debut novel, which is told across dual timelines and follows a medieval king and a modern day curator, with May We Feed The King earlier winning the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
Meanwhile, Kennard’s novel Black Bag follows a penniless actor hired by a professor to sit in a black bag at the back of the lecture hall.
Mary Beard, chairwoman of judges, said deciding what books to choose for the shortlist was a meeting “none of the judges is likely to forget”.
She said: “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.”
She said the novels were “writing at its best” and offered both “blissful escapism” and “plenty to change the way we see the world”.
The judging panel includes 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.
Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood added: “I knew it would be almost impossible for the judges to reduce their phenomenal longlist to just six books, and it was.”
The winning title and author will be announced on November 9 at a ceremony in London and livestreamed on the Booker Prize’s channels. The winner will receive £50,000 and a trophy named Iris.
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