The Booker Prize, awarded for fiction in English since 1969, names its 2026 winner at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate on Monday 9 November, chaired by Mary Beard.
The Booker Prize can turn a shortlisted novel into a bestseller before a winner is even named, and on Monday 9 November 2026 that winner is announced at Old Billingsgate, before a jury chaired by Mary Beard.
The Booker Prize was founded in Britain in 1969, and the shortlist alone multiplies a novel’s sales while 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 from year to year.
That annual reset is the prize’s defining rule, and judges appointed for one year, chosen from criticism, writing, publishing and beyond it, 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.
Mary Beard chairs the 2026 jury, with Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood beside her, and the six shortlisted authors dine in the room before the winner is announced. 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.