A scroll through Bookstagram confirms it. The longlist for the 2026 Booker Prize, which will be announced on Tuesday, is generating small mountains of speculation. The tea leaves, no longer in the to-be-read pile, have been translated into galleries and collages of bright, modish covers.
It all makes for pretty guesswork, but for a news outlet such as The Irish Times the big question is always whether any Irish authors will pop up on the “Booker dozen” of 12 or 13 books.
Last year the Trinidadian-Irish author Claire Adam was our only representative, with Love Forms; in 2024 it was the turn of Colin Barrett, author of Wild Houses. Neither title made the shortlist cut.
The year we’re still dining out on for now is 2023, when the quartet of Sebastian Barry, Elaine Feeney, Paul Lynch and Paul Murray accounted for almost a third of the longlist, with the two Pauls shortlisted and Lynch winning for Prophet Song.
READ MORE
Several worthy contenders could secure a spot this time. One name regularly floated is the twice-longlisted Donal Ryan, whose new novel, Where Are the Kings, will be published on August 13th. The never-longlisted Maggie O’Farrell is also attracting some hopeful chatter for Land.
Online speculation tends to be weighted in favour of established, well-known writers. This is partly because their novels are more likely to have been read in advance of the longlist reveal, but it’s also because seasoned Booker-watchers know that publishers can automatically submit the work of previously shortlisted authors without using up their entry quotas.
On paper, the rules imply that success begets success, though in practice most longlists contain a decent smattering of both debut novels and novels by underrated midcareer authors deemed “overdue”.
Booker judging panels have a habit of coming up with unobvious lists that simultaneously spotlight otherwise little-sold books and provide excellent fodder for articles about various big names being “snubbed”.
The judges for the 2020 prize were positively debut-smitten, with eight of their 13 selections being first novels. Last year there were just two. Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King, the recent winner of the Waterstones debut-fiction prize, is surely in with a shout, but this year’s crop of debutants are notably competing against a glut of previously shortlisted authors, among them Elizabeth Strout, Deborah Levy, Fiona Mozley, Daisy Johnson and Sebastian Barry, whose next novel, The Newer World, is out in September.
(This will be the final year with the potential for significant gaps between a book’s longlisting and its availability to purchase. For next year’s prize, after “feedback from readers”, the eligibility period will end on July 31st, 2027.)
Five former winners – Julian Barnes, Yann Martel, Marlon James, George Saunders and the much-tipped Douglas Stuart – could also feature. If Barnes (who is now 80) is recognised, it will be for a book that appears to reference his earlier victory, in 2011, for The Sense of an Ending, as in his final novel, Departure(s), he imagines himself as a hospital patient wearing a badge with the words “But I won the Booker Prize”, written in capitals.
Second-guessing the tendencies of the judges can be a foolish game. In retrospect, last year’s winner, David Szalay for Flesh, was exactly the sort of dark yet absurdly funny novel that would stand out to a panel chaired by Roddy Doyle. But we probably shouldn’t assume that this year’s longlist will find space for historical fiction just because Mary Beard is chairing, nor should we conclude from the presence of any music-themed novel that it must have been championed by another of this year’s judges, Jarvis Cocker.
One useful Booker rule of thumb we can probably keep, however, is that some zeitgeisty titles will get the nod. Strout’s The Things We Never Say, for instance, isn’t just a strong iteration of her brand of pathos; it also presents a highly topical depiction of the everyday emotional fallout from Trump 2.0.
Emily St John Mandel’s upcoming Exit Party is eye-catchingly set in Los Angeles in 2031, during “the first spring after the collapse of the United States”. And as simplistic as it would be to say that Transcription, by Ben Lerner, is about device addiction, that is a definite strand of his slender fourth novel, which, if it makes the longlist, is the kind of book that could go all the way.
I say this because it’s the only one I’ve read twice, and because once the process reaches the shortlist stage, in September, it is no longer about novels being subjectively good enough or “Booker” enough to cut through to the judges; it is instead about how they withstand being reread by them.
Until then, all we have is a hazy grasp of probability based on submission rules, unscientific conjecture about the preferences of the judges and a possibly irrelevant analysis of past performance. Fun.
