Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
The Booker Prize longlist arrived on 28 July, thirteen books chosen from 163 submitted, and the first thing worth saying about it is that nobody could have predicted it from the shape of last year’s.
That is the point of a good longlist, and it does not happen by accident. This year the judging panel is chaired by Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist who has spent three decades explaining Rome to people who thought they were not interested in Rome. She is joined by the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker, the critic Rebecca Liu and the novelist Patricia Lockwood, herself Booker-shortlisted. It is a panel with no obvious centre of gravity, and the list shows it.
The thirteen
Chloe Aridjis, The Shadow of the Object. Emma Cline, Switzy. Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere. M. John Harrison, The End of Everything. Marlon James, The Disappearers. Luke Kennard, Black Bag. Kenan Orhan, The Renovation. Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King. Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House. Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say. Douglas Stuart, John of John. Djamel White, All Them Dogs. Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors.
Two of those names have won before. Marlon James took the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, Douglas Stuart in 2020 for Shuggie Bain. Booker rules allow previous winners back, and juries rarely use that permission twice in one year. Doing it here reads less like deference than like a panel refusing to pretend it had not read the books.
Three are debuts: Orhan’s The Renovation, White’s All Them Dogs and Perry’s May We Feed the King, which already has the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize behind it. Three debuts out of thirteen is a high ratio for the Booker, and it is the single most interesting number on the list.
What the shape tells you
Beard described the list as ranging from the funny to the disturbing, sometimes both at once: dystopian fantasy, domestic drama, hard and mystical stories with magic in them. Read that alongside the physical books and a pattern shows up. The shortest is a little over 140 pages. The longest runs to 600. The publishers range from the largest houses in London to independent imprints operating on a fraction of their marketing budget.
A longlist that spreads that widely is making an argument about form. It says the novel is not currently converging on a house style, which is what people who read a lot of new fiction have been quietly worried about for several years. The settings back it up: Ireland and Italy, Mexico and Massachusetts, Jamaica and the Hebrides, universities, private jets and pubs, the past, the present and the future.
There is one more thing the shape says, and it is about the veterans. Strout’s The Things We Never Say is her eleventh novel. Riley’s The Palm House is her eighth. Harrison has been publishing since the late 1960s. A prize culture that only ever rewards the new eventually stops noticing writers who got better slowly, and this list notices them.
The obvious absence
Every longlist is also a list of what was left off, and the judges know it. With 163 submissions and thirteen places, roughly nine out of ten books that a publisher thought good enough to enter went nowhere. Some of those will turn up on other prize lists in the autumn, and a few will outlive everything here. That is not a criticism of the panel. It is the arithmetic of prizes, and it is worth stating plainly whenever a longlist is treated as a verdict on the year rather than as thirteen people’s reading.
What happens next
The shortlist of six comes on 22 September. The winner is announced on 9 November and takes £50,000; each shortlisted author receives £2,500. Between now and September, the usual thing will happen: sales will move for everyone on the list, and the books with the smallest publishers behind them will get the largest proportional lift. That is the real function of a longlist, whatever else gets said about it at the ceremony.
If you want to read ahead of the shortlist, the debuts are the sensible bet. They are the books nobody has an opinion about yet, and they are the reason lists like this are worth reading at all.
