The Booker Prize has announced the judges for its 2026 award.
In a surprise choice, Jarvis Cocker, the frontman for the legendary Britpop band Pulp, was announced as a judge for the award. Cocker was an editor-at-large for the British publisher Faber from 2012 to 2014, and he’s the author of a lyrics collection, Mother, Brother, Lover, and a memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop. Cocker’s selection echoes the prize’s decision last year to have another literary-minded celebrity—actor Sarah Jessica Parker—join the award jury.
Mary Beard, the classicist and author of books including S.P.Q.R., Twelve Caesars, and Emperor of Rome, will chair the judging panel. Raymond Antrobus, the deaf British-Jamaican poet and author of the memoir The Quiet Ear, will be a judge for the prize, alongside Patricia Lockwood, whose books include the memoir Priestdaddy and the novels No One Is Talking About This and Will There Ever Be Another You, and Rebecca Liu, the essayist and Guardian Saturday magazine editor.
Beard said in a statement, “‘I’m hugely looking forward to being part of the Booker team this year, and to getting down to business with my excellent fellow judges. Along with the excitement is a little apprehension—not least because, like many people, I’m quite a slow reader, so will have to learn how to speed up a bit!”
And Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said, “It’s a stellar group altogether: Raymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu, and Patricia Lockwood each have a different feel for words and have each contributed something unique to the culture at large. I’m hugely looking forward to witnessing their alchemy as literary sparring partners, and, eventually, to sharing their choices with the world. I have no doubt that in reading together they will make the best books emerge even better.”
The Booker Prize, given annually to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the U.K. and Ireland,” was first awarded in 1969. The most recent winner of the award was David Szalay for Flesh.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
