Booker prize 2026: ask our books team anything about this year’s contenders

For today’s reader Q&A we’ll be discussing the newly announced shortlist for the 2026 Booker prize which was revealed last night at a discussion at London’s Southbank centre featuring this year’s judging panel: Jarvis Cocker, Mary Beard, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and the Guardian’s own Rebecca Liu.

The panel’s final six selections for 2026 are:

The End of Everything by M John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail)
The Disappearers by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton)
Black Bag by Luke Kennard (John Murray)
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta)
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)
John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador)

The winner will be announced on 9 November 2026 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.

Liese Spencer and Charlotte Northedge are the Guardian’s joint head of books. Justine Jordan is the Guardian’s fiction editor and was a Booker judge in 2024, a task for which she had to 150 books in a row (her top tip for doing so was: “put your phone in a different room”).

Discuss the shortlist below and/or post a question for Liese, Charlotte and Justine.