Booker Prize judges reveal contentious shortlist featuring past winners James and Stuart

The Booker Prize judges have announced their shortlist of six novels, and the selection process was anything but serene. Past winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart both made the cut, competing once again for the prestigious award and its £50,000 prize. The judges, led by classicist Dame Mary Beard, described the work of narrowing the longlist down to these final six as "a tussle"—a characterization that proved to be something of an understatement when the panel members began discussing what had actually happened behind closed doors.

James, a Jamaican writer who won the Booker in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, is nominated this year for The Disappearers, an epic novel centered on a violent attack on eight gay men who gathered to rehearse a queer play in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988. Stuart, the Scottish author who won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, returns to the shortlist with John of John, a novel about a fashion student drawn back to his home in a small religious community in the Outer Hebrides during the mid-1990s, where both he and his father carry secrets. The other four finalists are American novelist Elizabeth Strout, whose The Things We Never Say follows a high school history teacher grappling with modern America; British authors M John Harrison, Luke Kennard, and Rebecca Perry, whose debut novel May We Feed the King moves between a present-day museum and a medieval court.

Seven books that had appeared on the July longlist were eliminated in the final round, a culling that drew particular attention because Emma Cline's Switzy had been widely expected to advance. The critic Giles Coren had written confidently in the Times that Switzy was a "nailed-on Booker winner," adding with theatrical certainty that if it didn't make the shortlist, he would eat Mary Beard. Beard responded with dry wit, saying she would "get the cooker prepared" and ask him how he preferred to be served.

The judges revealed the intensity of their deliberations when they spoke publicly about the selection process. Patricia Lockwood, a US novelist who has herself been shortlisted for the Booker, said she discovered during the judging meetings that she was "bossier than I believed myself to be." She found herself standing up frequently, making forceful cases for or against particular books, and at one point literally tossing books across the room. "I was like, 'Wow, yeah, I didn't know I had it in me,'" she said. Poet Raymond Antrobus confirmed that each judge had arrived at the table with a different vision for what the shortlist should be. "All of us individually had a different idea for a shortlist and then it was a tussle," he said. Lockwood jokingly elaborated: "A tussle, yeah. We wrestled like pigs in the mud!"

The panel also included Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of the band Pulp, who approached the judging role with the metaphor of musical collaboration. He described the experience as "a bit like being in a band," where individual members combine their efforts to create something none could produce alone. Cocker read entries while on tour and participated in at least one judges' meeting online from a hotel room in Australia at 2 a.m. local time, wearing a dressing gown. "When you're on tour, it's quite dull when you're travelling so it was quite good to have something to read," he said. "I became known for being in those meetings wearing a towelling robe." The final judge was Rebecca Liu, a journalist, editor, and critic.

Dame Mary Beard, chairing the panel, acknowledged that reaching consensus had been demanding. "Agreeing on the final six has been, to put it mildly, hard work," she said. Yet she praised the quality of this year's entries, noting that contemporary English-language fiction is "full of talent—talent old and talent new. It's full of wit, seriousness, pleasure, challenge, discomfort and real brilliance." She suggested that novelists deserve greater recognition than they typically receive. Antrobus emphasized that the six books chosen share a particular quality: they are works that "as well as having heart, also took risk." He stressed that these novels "cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. These are very human books for the way they talk about and navigate a lived experience."

The winner will be announced on November 9 in London, with the ceremony broadcast live on a special edition of BBC Radio 4's Front Row. The shortlist itself reflects the judges' conviction that contemporary fiction continues to push boundaries and demand serious attention, even as the selection process required them to defend their choices against considerable outside pressure and internal disagreement.