Booker Shortlist: Past Winners James and Stuart Return — SkimNews
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- Marlon James, who won the Booker in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, is shortlisted for The Disappearers, a 640-page Aids-era Jamaica novel — the longest book on the list.
- Douglas Stuart, the 2020 winner for Shuggie Bain, returns with John of John, a novel about a man's homecoming to the Outer Hebrides that a Guardian review called "an ardent exploration of the half-lives of queer men condemned to love, pine and suffer in silence."
- Elizabeth Strout, the 2009 Pulitzer winner for Olive Kitteridge, is shortlisted for The Things We Never Say, her first novel to depart from her recurring cast of characters.
- M John Harrison, a 2022 Booker judge, is nominated for The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic novel set in an unnamed Kent coastal town.
- Debut novelist Rebecca Perry completes the six-book shortlist with May We Feed the King, which won this year's Waterstones debut prize; Luke Kennard is shortlisted for the comic campus novel Black Bag.
- Four of the six shortlisted authors are men, and three of the male-authored books — Black Bag, The Disappearers, and John of John — explore masculinity and male sexuality; judge Jarvis Cocker called the male-heavy line-up "quite surprising, because generally speaking the male-written books weren't as good as the ones written by women."
- Notable omissions from the shortlist include Emma Cline's Switzy and Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House, both of which had been tipped as contenders.
Why it matters: With £50,000 and one of fiction's most prestigious platforms at stake, the panel's three-hour shortlisting meeting produced a list dominated by men — a result judge Jarvis Cocker himself flagged as surprising given the perceived quality gap. The 9 November winner announcement will determine whether a two-time winner can join the rare club of repeat Booker laureates, and whether the prize leans into the masculinity-and-queer-male-intimacy thread running through half the list.
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