Booker longlist pairs past winners with experimental novels
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- Marlon James and Douglas Stuart lead the longlist as past Booker winners, returning with The Disappearers (set during a 1988 Kingston mob attack on a gay theatre group) and John of John (set on a Hebridean island where a young gay man confronts his devout father's hidden sexuality).
- Elizabeth Strout secured her third Booker nomination with The Things We Never Say, joined on the American side by Emma Cline, whose Switzy follows a high-flyer losing grip as dementia encroaches.
- American Ben Lerner was widely tipped for Transcription but failed to make the list, while British author Gwendoline Riley finally made the cut with The Palm House after 25 years of writing about emotional narcissism in family relationships.
- Judge Patricia Lockwood told the Observer the list reflects a new avant-garde response to AI and fractured attention, and joked she wanted to choose "the craziest book on Earth" — a mood backed by absurdist entries including a Kafkaesque bathroom-turned-prison in Kenan Orhan's The Renovation and Luke Kennard's Black Bag, in which a failing actor lives inside a leather bag on campus.
- M John Harrison's The End of Everything, described as "the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf," depicts an England succumbing to alien invasion, while debut novelist Missouri Williams's The Vivisectors offers a "deeply strange parable of culture wars and civilisational decline" set in a university town overrun by vegetation.
- The shortlist will be released on 22 September.
Why it matters: With Lockwood's panel explicitly rewarding genre-defying work — one novel features sentient bathrooms, another an alien-invaded England — the longlist signals that the judges are using this year's Booker to elevate experimental fiction that addresses AI, culture wars and identity politics through surrealism rather than realism, a stance that will be tested when the shortlist narrows 13 entries to six on 22 September.
