Booker Prize shortlist: Marlon James and Douglas Stuart eye historic second win

Marlon James and Douglas Stuart have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, putting each in line to become only the fifth author to win the award twice.

The six-strong shortlist, announced on Tuesday, was drawn from 13 semifinalists named in July and an original field of 163 submissions. Judges described the selected books as "moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful."

James is nominated for The Disappearers, which follows a group of gay men in his native Jamaica during the hostile climate of the 1980s. He won the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Stuart, the 2020 winner for Shuggie Bain, is shortlisted for John of John, a story of father-son secrets set on a remote Scottish island.

A win for either would place them alongside J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood as double recipients of the award.

The list also includes Pulitzer Prize laureate Elizabeth Strout for The Things We Never Say, a small-town tale set in her native New England. Strout, who won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, was a Booker finalist in 2022 for Oh William!.

British authors Rebecca Perry and M. John Harrison complete the field alongside Luke Kennard. Perry is nominated for the medieval-to-modern tale May We Feed the King, while Harrison, at 81, would become the oldest winner if his postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything prevails. Kennard is shortlisted for the campus novel Black Bag.

It is only the second time in the past decade that men have outnumbered women on the shortlist.

Mary Beard, the historian who chairs the judging panel, said the books had come to feel like old friends after at least two readings. "And it was painful to have to let some of them go, with their now bent spines and dog-eared pages, their brilliant capacity to make us think, argue and sometimes disagree," she said.

Beard, who sits on the panel with Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and American novelist Patricia Lockwood, said the novels range "from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated."

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize honours long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The winner receives 50,000 pounds (about $67,000) and a trophy named Iris, after the 1978 winner Iris Murdoch. Last year's prize went to Flesh by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.

This year's winner will be announced on Monday, November 9.