The jury panel for the Booker Prize 2026, the world's most prestigious prize for a single work of fiction, has been announced.
Mary Beard, a renowned classicist, author and broadcaster, will chair the panel. The panel also includes Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood.
Mary's much-celebrated works include the 2008 Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and Women & Power. Her latest release, Emperor of Rome in 2024, offered an account of Roman history in a unique style and a narrative that has never been presented before.
Mary's works are critically acclaimed, widely read and have been translated into many languages across the globe.
Raymond Antrobus, diagnosed with hearing disability at 6, primarily dwells on the subjects of sound, language, identity and memory. He is well-known for his poetry collections, including Shapes & Disfigurements, To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, All The Names Given, and Signs, Music.
Jarvis Cocker, a musician and broadcaster, is well known for his lyric collection -- Mother, Brother, Lover and his long-form prose, Good Pop, Bad Pop.
Rebecca Liu is a writer, critic, and editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine.
Novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood is best known for her novel No One Is Talking About This. The book is centred upon a social media influencer experiencing the digital void until urgent texts from her mother over an emergency in the family force her to face the real-world complexities of human relationships.
The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. However, she missed emerging as a winner only to win the esteemed Dylan Thomas Prize the same year.
This year’s judges shall scrutinise the works of long-form fiction by writers belonging to any country, written in English and published in Britain and Ireland.
Significantly, the books should have been released between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
The ‘Booker Dozen’ will be announced on 28 July 2026, and six books shortlisted among the 'Booker Dozen' will be announced in September.
The Booker Prize 2026 will be declared in November, and the winning author will secure £50,000. Each of the six shortlisted authors will get £2,500.
In 2025, David Szalay won the Booker Prize for his novel 'Flesh'. The novel unravels a series of events encountered by a man beyond his grasp.