Booker Prize 2026: Thirteen long-list announced with Four LGBTQ+ Themed Nominations

The world's leading translated fiction award has doubled its prize fund to £100,000 and revealed a 13-book longlist featuring four queer love stories and debut authors from four continents.

The International Booker Prize has doubled its prize money to £100,000 after securing a decade of funding from Bukhman Philanthropies. The announcement came alongside the reveal of this year's 13-book longlist in February.

Four titles carrying LGBTQ+ themes appear on the Booker Prize longlist thia year; The Disappearers by Marlon James, which explores gay life, homophobia and violence in 1980s and 1990s Jamaica; John of John by Douglas Stuart, about a gay father and son concealing their sexuality from their religious island community and from each other; All Them Dogs by Djamel White, a queer crime novel about desire between two men inside Dublin’s hypermasculine criminal underworld; and The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, which appears to include a significant queer relationship or perspective, though available synopses are less explicit than for the other three titles.

Chosen from 128 submissions, the selection features books translated from 11 languages by authors representing 14 nationalities across four continents. Among the memorable characters are a queer Argentinian conquistador, a Japanese novelist with a "monstrous appetite", and a Danish noblewoman accused of sorcery.

The full longlist includes The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, The Deserters by Mathias Énard, and Small Comfort by Ia Genberg. Also longlisted were She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre, The Witch by Marie NDiaye, Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, and The Wax Child by Olga Ravn.

The judging panel was chaired by author Natasha Brown, joined by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, bookseller Troy Onyango, and novelist Nilanjana S. Roy. 

Under the new partnership, the prize, now renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize, will see its winning prize double from £50,000 to £100,000, split equally between author and translator. Bukhman Philanthropies is a grant-giving organisation established by Playrix co-founders Daria and Dmitri Bukhman, focusing on literature, neonatal and maternal health, and mental health.

The Booker Prize Foundation will continue gifting 500 sets of each shortlist to UK libraries and improving access through its prison reading programme Books Unlocked. The prize celebrates its 10th anniversary in its current form this year, having become what organisers call "the world's most influential award for translated fiction".