Marlon James and Douglas Stuart Could Make Booker Prize History With Second Wins

LONDON (AP) — Marlon James and Douglas Stuart could become the fifth authors to win the Booker Prize twice after their novels were selected for Tuesday’s shortlist for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards.

The judging panel narrowed 13 finalists announced in July to six. The panel described the shortlisted novels as moving, fast-paced, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful. They were chosen from 163 submissions.

The Booker Prize honors long-form fiction written in English by authors of any nationality and published in the U.K. or Ireland between October 2025 and Sept. 2026. The winner receives 50,000 pounds, or about $67,000, along with a trophy named Iris after 1978 winner Iris Murdoch.

“Most of these books were beginning to feel like old friends after at least two readings,” said historian Mary Beard, who headed the judging panel. “It was painful to have to let some of them go, with their now bent spines and dog-eared pages, their brilliant capacity to make us think, argue and sometimes disagree.”

James’ “The Disappearers” follows a group of gay men living in their native Jamaica during the hostile social climate of the 1980s. Stuart’s “John of John” explores secrets between a father and son on a remote Scottish island. James won the Booker in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” while Stuart took the prize in 2020 for “Shuggie Bain.”

Either writer would become the fifth author to receive the award twice, joining J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.

Also shortlisted is Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, whose intimate small-town novel “The Things We Never Say” returns to the lives of people in her native New England. Her novel “Oh William!” was a finalist in 2022. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “Olive Kitteridge.”

Other nominees are British author Rebecca Perry for “May We Feed the King,” a story spanning the medieval and modern eras; 81-year-old M. John Harrison for the postapocalyptic novel “The End of Everything,” which would make him the award’s oldest winner if victorious; and Luke Kennard for the unconventional campus novel “Black Bag.”

This is only the second time in the past decade that male authors have outnumbered women on the shortlist.

The judging panel also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and American novelist Patricia Lockwood. Beard said the deliberations ended with the shortlisted books “neatly propped up against one another, almost glowing.”

“These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated,” she said.

Established in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming authors’ careers and is open to novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland. Last year’s winner was “Flesh” by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.

The 2026 winner will be announced on Monday, Nov. 9.

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