Djamel White, a 28-year-old Irish writer and former Dublin tattoo shop manager, is the youngest author on this year’s £50,000 Booker Prize longlist with his first novel, All Them Dogs.The judges called it “a mouthy, ballsy and bracingly unsentimental portrait of west Dublin gangland, set well off the beaten track of the city’s usual literary landmarks”. “It charts the lives, loyalties and dealings of a semi-organised crime world. Yet, the novel’s real achievement lies in something quieter and more easily overlooked beneath the bullets and bone-breaking dramatics: a subtle, textured humanity woven among the violent hyper-masculine protagonists,” the judges said.[ Author Djamel White: ‘I didn’t feel like I fit in at school or at home’Opens in new window ]“White is an impressive stylist. He has an ear for dialogue that is both racy and real, and a gift for atmospheric description that feels at once inventive and classically grounded. This writer understands that the vernacular of the street, handled with precision and care, can carry as much emotional and literary weight as any elevated register.”Books on the longlist and judges’ commentsbooks The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis “A mysterious and free-wheeling novel which moves between the real world and dream-states. We were charmed by its suggestion that the most meaningful truths can be found in the shadows.” Switzy by Emma Cline “Cline writes vividly about all the trappings of the elite – the private jets, the heirloom watches – as well as their sad social cost in a story that feels immersive, elegiac, and very real."Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman “A spellbinding novel or a play with just four characters? Philosophically, politically, and spiritually adventurous, this slim, ambitious volume has the power to transform.”The End of Everything by M John Harrison “A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering, oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.” Read our review here.The Disappearers by Marlon James “A book that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy, as what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning. James is a singular literary talent.”Black Bag by Luke Kennard “This of-the-moment satire considers anonymity and disgust, online rackets, and what it means to find love in our unstable times. We admired its sharply crafted sentences and humour.” Read our review here.The Renovation by Kenan Orhan “A hilarious fantasy which had some of the judges laughing out loud. But it also poses questions about political activism, belonging, and the different forms imprisonment can take.”May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry “A wonderfully enticing combination of themes, woven together with a delicacy of touch. You can’t read it without reflecting on the fragile boundary between the present and the past.” Read our review here.The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley “A note-perfect portrait of rarefied London intellectual spaces, and the people who make up that impersonal thing we think of as the Establishment. Minimalist, precise, and indelible.” Read our review here.The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout “A devastating look at the dangerous cracks in family life and in the contemporary world at large. Strout’s prose is brilliantly understated and all the more powerful for that.” Read our review here.John of John by Douglas Stuart “This excavation of family, violence and shame is woven through with beautiful imagistic detail, and – unexpectedly – shades of hope. We loved the rich, textural detail of the story." Read our review here.All Them Dogs by Djamel White “A ballsy, unsentimental portrait of west Dublin gangland, set well off the beaten track of the city’s usual literary landmarks. White has an ear for dialogue that is both racy and real.” Read our review here.The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams “A bracing antidote to the cosy campus and the dark academia novel, The Vivisectors is genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told – and in places truly menacing." Read our review here.As well as two other debutants, the longlist includes two former winners, Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings, 2015) and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain, 2020), and three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout. M John Harrison, aged 81, would become the oldest winner of the prize (a title held by Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she jointly won in 2019 with The Testaments).The shortest novel is Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman at just more than 140 pages, whilst the longest – Marlon James’s The Disappearers – is more than 600 pages long.Marlon James’s blurb for All Them Dogs called it “a book you inhale, devour, grapple with, and reel from, more than read ... where everything is on the edge of a knife and where love, like death, is either a kiss or a bullet away”.[ Elizabeth Strout: ‘It’s a deeply sad time in the US’Opens in new window ]In her Irish Times review of White’s book, Elizabeth Mannion wrote: “All Them Dogs is filled with a street lyricism that mines masculinity in a manner reminiscent of Jim Carroll or Robert McLiam Wilson. There’s a poetry on the pages here that tenderises even the most hardened characters, as they alternately strut and cower at the mercy of criminal impulses. That’s part of this novel’s magic. And it is a magical piece of writing.”White spent most of his childhood in Cavan with his mother, stepfather and brother. He never met his father, an Algerian man his mother met when she was an au pair in France. He now lives with his mother and grandparents in Lucan.After attending an early school leavers course at Kylemore Community Training Centre, White had an internship with Fighting Words, the creative writing NGO set up by Roddy Doyle and Seán Love, and later became a volunteer mentor. “My formative years, without question, were the years I spent in Fighting Words,” he wrote in his introduction to last year’s Fighting Words supplement in The Irish Times.He went on to study at UCD aged 21 where he earned a bachelor of arts in English and creative writing, followed by a master of fine arts degree in creative writing, and was mentored by writers including Anne Enright, who said: “In the best Irish style, Djamel White uses a local voice to blast through language and make it new. His hero, Tony Ward, is a bittersweet confection of self-defeating swagger and All Them Dogs is a stylish, adroit and gritty debut.” Doyle has described White’s book as a hugely satisfying read that is “exhilarating and often frightening”. “It adds new streets to Dublin’s literary map,” he said.In an interview in The Irish Times earlier this year, White described himself as a “working-class writer”. He became a reader early on, inspired by a teacher reading him Roald Dahl at school. “I wasn’t a sporty kid … So that was the thing I latched on to. And the act of doing it was celebrated. My family aren’t readers. We never had books in the house. My family were really impressed by it ... It made me very proud.”All Them Dogs emerged from a short story, Blue Opel, in which he first developed the wounded, violent Tony.The longlist was selected by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by classicist Mary Beard, and featuring poet Raymond Antrobus; Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker; critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted author Patricia Lockwood.“It’s been an extraordinary seven months,” Beard said. “The five Booker judges have each read 163 books, discussed and debated them, and sometimes re-read them, to whittle them down to a longlist of just 13. “Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock. “And they are set anywhere and everywhere: Ireland and Italy, Mexico and Massachusetts, Jamaica and the Hebrides, universities, private planes and pubs, past, present and future. But there’s one thing they all share. Every writer on our longlist brilliantly musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds.[ Mary Beard: ‘What are historians in the future going to find weird about us?’Opens in new window ]“Books are not mirrors: they don’t simply reflect ourselves back to us. One of the many important things about fiction is that it helps us see what it might be like not to be us, to begin to understand the perspectives of others, and to imagine what it might be like to see the world differently. Great books are not cosy. In their various ways, the novels we have chosen are (we hope) dynamite."The shortlist will be announced at the Southbank Centre in London on September 22nd and the winner on November 9th at Old Billingsgate in London.