Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Booker Prize Longlist Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.  

The Booker Prize Longlist was recently announced. What is the Booker Prize? From their About Page:

The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades

Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career. 

Go to this page, helpfully titled, "Everything you need to know about the Booker Prize 2026 longlist." The page itself is a gold mine of a resource to help readers. It had details about every book, information about the judges. And on the prize's main page, there are even more articles about this year's longlist. I will link to some of the article below.

But even with the regular. display, backlist, and collection development advice I give for every award (access above), The Book Prize is an award you need to know about for a variety of reasons, reasons which give you even more options to serve your patrons.

First, these books are always among the top books written in English every year, which means this year and past year's lists make for reliable suggestions to your curious readers. The backlist is also very easy to access in two different ways. The first is a page here where you can use drop down menus to do so deep dive searching and/or scroll under those drop downs to see the announcements for each year in reverse chronological order. The second is a page here with a list of each year (reverse chronological order) of every title beginning with the winner and then listing all of the longlist titles and the titles are linked to get even more information about them.

Second, these titles (2026 or any year in the recent past) tend to be on the "readable side." What do I mean with that? What I mean is that they tend to pick excellent titles of high literary merit that are readable for a general adult audience. These are critically acclaimed, literary fiction titles that you can give out to a wide swath of readers with confidence. 

Third, the Booker Prize has a history of identifying authors worth you time early in their careers, sometimes earlier than they get singled out for other major awards. These are authors worth having on yourself and suggesting, but you (and your readers) may not have them on their radar yet. 

Fourth, this award list serves as a readalike for itself. Not all awards can do this, but I have used this award list as a suggestion engine for readers who have enjoyed any book that has appeared on the longlists. In fact, back in the early days of the 2000s, I offered a "Holds Without Hassle" program at my library, and not only did we allow them to pick authors for that list, but we also had a few awards they could select. This award (called the Man Booked back in the day) was one of the most popular choices. People wanted the winner put on automatic hold and then after reading it, we helped them find the other nominated titles. I have seen this work in action, even with the books being about widely different topics and from a range of authors.  

Fifth, and this is how my readers first found out about this award in the first place, these titles make excellent book discussion choices. There is a very helpful Booker Library, where you can find books by author, title, or even pick a prize year. And to make it even easier for you, they have Reading Guides designed specifically for libraries. Using the backlist from 2-5 years ago is a great resource for winning discussion titles.

And finally, the judges. I have talked about this before, but look at that list of judges from this year or past years. (Click on the post for each year on that page and scroll down to read about the judges.) Take this year for example. The judges themselves are excellent options for displays, suggestions, and purchase if you don't own their books. You can also use the judges list as one of my 5 Resources You Cannot Live Without-- Author Recs of Other Authors. A couple years ago year, I wrote about how that works in relation to the NYT Best Books of the Century discussion.

I am sure there are even more reasons why this award is a great resource for you to help your readers. Click through for all of the details and information and decide how you can best use this list for your library. The site is really a treasure trove of resources, suggestions, and lists all year long. 

I will end this post with  the most basic info-- the titles on the long list and the summary by the jurors about the list as a whole. All from this page:

The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced – a selection of 13 superb works of long-form fiction, chosen from 163 titles written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.   

As Mary Beard, Chair of this year’s judges, says: ‘Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books 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.’

The 13 nominated books, and their UK publishers, are:  

• The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis (Chatto & Windus) 

• Switzy by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus) 

• Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (Fitzcarraldo Editions) 

• 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) 

• The Renovation by Kenan Orhan (Hamish Hamilton) 

• May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta) 

• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (Picador)   

• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)  

• John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador) 

• All Them Dogs by Djamel White (John Murray) 

• The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (4th Estate)