News Beat
Booker Prize 2026 judges: Mary Beard leads ‘stellar’ panel including Pulp musician Jarvis Cocker
The judges for the Booker Prize 2026 have been revealed, with Mary Beard announced as chair.
The classicist, writer and broadcaster will be chairing the judging panel where she will be joined by award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus, Pulp musician Jarvis Cocker, journalist and critic Rebecca Liu, and Booker Prize-shortlisted author Patricia Lockwood.
“Along with the excitement is a little apprehension – not least because, like many people, I’m quite a slow reader, so will have to learn how to speed up a bit!” said Beard.
“The Booker is a celebration of fiction and fiction-writers in all their wondrous variety, and of their tremendous power to make us think differently about the world.
“But it is also a celebration of reading and readers, in all their wondrous variety: at their library desk, on the train, curled up in bed; the quick and the slow; the confident and the puzzled. It’s a celebration of the impact that words have on us all.”
In a statement announcing the line-up, Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that Beard’s background as a classical scholar will benefit the judges given that “so much contemporary fiction is based on history, or inspired by myth”.
“It’s a stellar group altogether,” Wood continued, adding that the judges “each have a different feel for words and have contributed something unique to the culture at large”.
Founded in 1969, the Booker prize is awarded annually for the best original work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
This year’s judges are looking for the best work published between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026. Submissions from publishers are now open.
A longlist of the “Booker Dozen” – comprising 12 or 13 books – will be announced on Tuesday 28 July 2026, with a shortlist of six titles to follow in September.
The winner of the 2026 Booker Prize will be announced at a ceremony in November next year, and will receive £50,000 in addition to the £2,500 prize awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.
Earlier this year, the 2025 Booker prize was won by Flesh by British-Hungarian author David Szalay. His sixth novel, which follows the travails of an inscrutable Hungarian man over the decades, was unanimously chosen as the winner after a six-hour discussion, said Irish writer Roddy Doyle, chair of the Booker judging panel and previous recipient of the prestigious award.
Serving alongside Doyle on the judging panel are actor Sarah Jessica Parker as well as writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, and Kiley Reid.
Flesh sold over 7,900 hardback copies in the UK in the week following its win, a 1,441 per cent week-on-week sales increase, with combined e-book and audio book sales in the same week totalling 15,000 copies, representing a 2,508 per cent increase.
Publisher Jonathan Cape immediately reprinting 150,000 copies.
His win was preceded in 2024 by the Kent-born author Samantha Harvey, who took home the award for her space station saga Orbital.
Other previous winners include Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Bernardine Evaristo, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, JM Coetzee, and Douglas Stuart.
