The big reveal of the 2026 Booker Prize longlist was greeted with the usual fanfare last week, and, while it doesn’t usually draw much more than a passing glance from me, for once I was paying attention.
Despite its clout as the UK’s ultimate literary prize, I’ve not given a trapeze-swinging toss about the Booker since the shambolic 2019 edition. For those who don’t remember, the judges gave the prize that year to Margaret Atwood as what seemed to be an ad hoc lifetime achievement award, instead of bestowing it on the greatest English language novel of the 21st century: Lucy Ellmann’s seminal, thousand page, single-sentence tome Ducks, Newburyport.
They then compounded the fiasco by making Atwood a joint winner with Bernardine Evaristo, thus overshadowing Evaristo’s landmark achievement of being the first Black woman to win the prize.
The difference for me this year was that for a fortnight in the run-up, I was being inundated with screenshots of countless book bloggers, particularly on Instagram, clamouring for my debut novel, Keshed, to be included.
Joint 2019 winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. The shared prize overshadowed Evaristo’s landmark achievement of being the first Black woman to win the Booker (Photo: Jeff Spicer/Getty)
