Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker will feature on the 2026 Booker prize judging panel that will be chaired by the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard.
Novelist Patricia Lockwood has also been named as a judge, along with the poet Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu, an editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine.
Beard said that while she is “hugely looking forward” to being on the panel, she has “a little apprehension” because she is “quite a slow reader, so will have to learn how to speed up a bit”.
“So much contemporary fiction is based on history, or inspired by myth, that Booker prize judges often find themselves asking: ‘What is a novel’s role in relation to the past? What can the imagination do with facts?’” said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker prize foundation. “These questions offer ways to think about fiction of all kinds, and I’m delighted that the distinguished and much-loved classical scholar Mary Beard has agreed to steer this year’s panel.”
The prize is now open for submissions from publishers. The judges will consider long-form works of fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
Over the next several months, the panel will narrow down the entries to a longlist – a “Booker dozen” of 12 or 13 books – announced on 28 July. A shortlist of six books will be unveiled in September, with the winner announced in November. The winner of the prize will receive £50,000, with each shortlisted author awarded £2,500.
Wood described the panel as a “stellar group”, with each judge having “a different feel for words” and having “contributed something unique to the culture at large”.
Cocker – who founded Pulp while at secondary school in 1978, and whose band grew to become one of the biggest acts of the 90s – published his lyric collection Mother, Brother, Lover with Faber in 2011, and went on to be an editor-at-large at the publisher between 2012 and 2014. His memoir, Good Pop, Bad Pop, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022.
Beard, a celebrated classicist who regularly appears on TV and radio, has published a number of books on ancient history, including Pompeii, SPQR, and Emperor of Rome.
Liu, a writer, critic and editor, has interviewed artists and writers including Bernardine Evaristo, Xiaolu Guo and Kiley Reid.
Lockwood was previously shortlisted for the Booker prize for her novel No One Is Talking About This, which won the Dylan Thomas prize. Her other books include her memoir Priestdaddy and her 2025 novel Will There Ever Be Another You. Antrobus, meanwhile, is the author of a number of prize-winning poems and collections including The Perseverance and Can Bears Ski?
The 2025 Booker prize was won by David Szalay for his novel Flesh, selected by a panel chaired by Roddy Doyle and featuring the actor Sarah Jessica Parker.
