The Booker Prize 2026 is announced at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate on Monday 9 November 2026, with Mary Beard chairing a jury that includes Jarvis Cocker and Patricia Lockwood.
The Booker Prize was founded in Britain in 1969 and is the most consequential award given to a single work of fiction in English. It has made careers in a night and reorganised publishing schedules around itself, because the shortlist alone multiplies a novel’s sales and the winner’s book stays in print for decades. The Booker Prize Foundation, a charity, has run it since 2002, and a panel of five judges reads the year’s submitted fiction from scratch each time, with no continuity of taste from one year to the next.
That annual reset is the prize’s defining rule and the reason its arguments are public. Judges are appointed for one year, chosen from criticism, writing, publishing and beyond it, and they disagree in front of an audience rather than behind a committee door. Since 2014 the prize has been open to any novel written in English and published in Britain, rather than to Commonwealth and Irish writers alone. The winner receives £50,000 and each shortlisted author £2,500.
The 2026 winner is named at Old Billingsgate on Monday 9 November. Mary Beard chairs, with Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood beside her, and the six shortlisted authors dine in the room before the announcement. The ceremony is invitation only, so the public routes in are the shortlist announcement at the Southbank Centre on 22 September and the shortlist readings at the Queen Elizabeth Hall the night before.