Announcing the Booker Prize 2026 longlist

The Booker Prize longlist arrived this morning, which means two things. Thirteen novels have been lifted out of the great heaving mass of new fiction and placed under the brightest possible literary spotlight; and readers everywhere are looking at their already unstable piles of unread books and wondering whether furniture can technically be replaced by novels.

A Dublin voice makes the Booker Dozen
Djamel White was managing a tattoo shop in Dublin two years ago. This week his debut novel, All Them Dogs, was named to the 2026 Booker Prize longlist, alongside work from Marlon James, Douglas Stuart and Elizabeth Strout. At 28, he is the youngest writer on the list.

All Them Dogs is set in west Dublin, in the years just before the pandemic, and follows Tony Ward as he returns to a gangland that has moved on without him. Anne Enright has praised White's ear for local voice, and Marlon James has called the book compulsive reading. Roddy Doyle put it simply: it adds new streets to Dublin's literary map, which may be the most important thing a debut can do..

Thirteen books, seven nationalities, three continents. All chosen from 163 titles. There are serious names: two previous winners, Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, return, while Elizabeth Strout receives her third Booker nomination. But ten of the thirteen writers are appearing on the longlist for the first time, and three are debut novelists. The judges, chaired by Mary Beard and including Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood, have chosen a list interested in strangeness, risk and books that refuse to behave themselves.

This year's longlist is intriguing because it does not appear to have been assembled around one respectable literary theme. Instead, we have alien invasion, dementia, queer desire, gangland Dublin, political repression, cultural collapse, historical reconstruction and at least one deeply peculiar university experiment involving a black leather bag. There is absurdism and surrealism here, but also grief, family, class, masculinity and the ordinary human need to be seen properly.

The familiar names are familiar for good reason. Marlon James's The Disappearers returns to Jamaica and follows the aftermath of a homophobic mob attack on a gay theatre group. Douglas Stuart's John of John brings a young gay man home to the Isle of Harris, into a world of faith, repression and fading island traditions. Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say continues her extraordinary ability to write about apparently ordinary lives until you realise she has quietly exposed an entire country underneath them.

We are especially pleased to see Strout there. I have only just written about my complicated journey with The Things We Never Say: resistance, surrender, a pause, and then finishing it in one sitting. It is not a flashy novel, but Strout understands that private disappointments and domestic silences are never merely private. They absorb class, politics, shame and history. A Booker nomination feels entirely deserved.

But the name we will be watching most closely in Ireland is Djamel White. At twenty-eight, he is the youngest writer on the list, the only Irish entrant and one of its three debut novelists. All Them Dogs is set in west Dublin and follows Tony Ward, recently returned from Britain and eager to regain his place in the criminal world. His dangerous association with gang enforcer Flute Walsh becomes complicated by attraction, vulnerability and all the things men in violent worlds are trained not to admit.

Irish fiction is often praised internationally for its lyricism, rural memory, family fracture and beautifully managed sadness. All Them Dogs comes barging in from a different Dublin: volatile, funny, frightening, working-class and queer. It takes the machinery of the gangland thriller and uses it to examine masculinity, desire and the terrible performance of hardness.

The wider longlist seems determined to widen the map too. M John Harrison brings literary science fiction into the centre with The End of Everything. Kenan Orhan's The Renovation begins with the alarming idea that a bathroom in Italy has become a prison cell in Istanbul. Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King moves between a present-day curator and a medieval ruler. Luke Kennard's Black Bag offers comedy, humiliation and a struggling actor whose life has gone spectacularly sideways.

Will all thirteen work for every reader? Absolutely not and thank goodness for that. A prize list should not feel like a compulsory curriculum devised by people who disapprove of pleasure. It should provoke arguments, enthusiasms, bafflement and the occasional furious abandonment.

The shortlist will be announced on 22nd September, with the winner revealed on 9th November. Until then, the reading begins. My early loyalties are with Strout, because she made me work for my admiration, and with White, because an Irish debut about queer desire and gangland Dublin has landed on one of the world's most closely watched fiction lists.

That is not simply good news. It is exciting.

The 2026 Booker Prize longlist, all thirteen books.