The 2026 Booker Prize longlist is out, and it professes to be one that “rewards risk”. One might ask: What flavour of risk? One that calls out genocide and war-mongering, or perhaps, narrators splintering between irreconcilable generational worldviews? Is the risk demographic? Or, is it a mere stylistic risk, comprising intriguing allegory and whimsical strangeness?

Mary Beard, chair of judges, says the list helps writers “take the reader to new places”, as long as they are largely in the Anglosphere. Of the 13, 11 longlisted authors hold a British or American passport or are dual nationals grafted onto the Anglo-American trunk (a Mexican-British writer, a Turkish-American one, a Scottish-American one). Only Marlon James of Jamaica is an outlier. The authors are from “seven countries and three continents”, but the third continent, Asia, only holds if one counts Turkey, represented by Kenan........

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