James, Stuart on Shortlist for Second Booker Prize Win

Historian Mary Beard, head of the judging panel, highlighted the shortlisted books as “moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful.”.

The Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality. Written in English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland between October 2025 and Sept.

2026. The winner stands to win 50,000 pounds.

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James's novel, The Disappearers, examining the lives of gay men in 1980s Jamaica, where homophobia ran rampant. Meanwhile, Stuart's John of John is set on a remote Scottish island, where family secrets simmer just beneath the surface. Both authors have garnered critical acclaim: James took home the Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Meanwhile, Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain.

Also on the shortlist is Pulitzer Prize laureate Elizabeth Strout, whose heartfelt small-town tale “The Things We Never Say” once again celebrates the lives of those in her native New England. Strout’s “Oh William!” was a finalist in 2022. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for “Olive Kitteridge.”.

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Rebecca Perry's "May We Feed the King" joins a distinguished group of British authors, including M. John Harrison, whose 81-year-old status could soon be eclipsed if his post-apocalyptic novel "The End of Everything" takes top honors; Luke Kennard's offbeat campus novel "Black Bag" rounds out the eclectic list.

Beard said the judging panel, which included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and American novelist Patricia Lockwood, concluded that their deliberations “neatly propped up against one another, almost glowing.”.

“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,” she said.