Masculinity dominates the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist

The Booker Prize 2026 shortlist. Three of the six books on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist explore masculinity and male sexuality. Interestingly, last year’s Booker Prize winner, David Szalay, also placed modern masculinity at the centre of his story, Flesh.The 2026 shortlist, announced last week, features two previous Booker Prize winners — Marlon James and Douglas Stuart — as well as Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.James’s The Disappearers, described by The New York Times as “the novel of the decade, if not the century”, centres on an attack on a group of gay men in late-1980s Jamaica, while they are rehearsing a play. At 640 pages, it is the longest book on the list. James earlier took home the Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings.Stuart, who won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain in 2020, has been shortlisted for John of John, which tells the story of 22-year-old John-Calum Macleod’s homecoming to Scotland’s Isle of Harris. It explores the queer lives of both father and son.Strout has been nominated for the Prize twice before. Her novel, The Things We Never Say, is about Artie Dam, a lonely high school history teacher in Massachusetts. When he finds out a secret, it threatens to upend his world.The shortlist also includes speculative fiction writer M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic novel about a world in which an unknown entity has altered the course of humanity.Novelist and poet Luke Kennard’s Black Bag draws on a bizarre real-life experiment conducted in the 1960s by Charles Goetzinger, a professor at Oregon State University, and offers a darkly comic critique of higher education as well as an investigation into the crisis of masculinity.Finally, debut novelist Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King, which won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, moves between the life of an overlooked medieval king, whose troubled reign puts the future of his kingdom at risk, and a curator who becomes so absorbed in his story that the boundaries between her past and present begin to blur.The winner of this year’s £50,000 prize will be announced on November 9.radhika.s@thehindu.co.in Published - September 23, 2026 06:00 pm IST