The big reveal of the 2026 Booker Prize longlist was greeted with the usual fanfare last week, and, while it doesn’t usually draw much more than a passing glance from me, for once I was paying attention.
Despite its clout as the UK’s ultimate literary prize, I’ve not given a trapeze-swinging toss about the Booker since the shambolic 2019 edition. For those who don’t remember, the judges gave the prize that year to Margaret Atwood as what seemed to be an ad hoc lifetime achievement award, instead of bestowing it on the greatest English language novel of the 21st century: Lucy Ellmann’s seminal, thousand page, single-sentence tome Ducks, Newburyport.
They then compounded the fiasco by making Atwood a joint winner with Bernardine Evaristo, thus overshadowing Evaristo’s landmark achievement of being the first Black woman to win the prize.
The difference for me this year was that for a fortnight in the run-up, I was being inundated with screenshots of countless book bloggers, particularly on Instagram, clamouring for my debut novel, Keshed, to be included.
Joint 2019 winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. The shared prize overshadowed Evaristo’s landmark achievement of being the first Black woman to win the Booker (Photo: Jeff Spicer/Getty)Whatever my personal feelings about the prize, it was a buzz – and extremely surreal – seeing longlist mock-ups with pictures of Keshed, a social realist novel set over 40 years in the working-class North, alongside the work of colossi like Marlon James and Douglas Stuart (both of whom went on to make the list). Even though I knew there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of it happening.
Why? Because year after year, publishers and public alike know that the list will largely consist of Big Books with Big Themes, written by Big Name Writers working with Big Publishers and promoted with Big Marketing Budgets, that are genetically engineered specifically to win these kind of prizes. Tiny independents like Ortac Press, who published Keshed, rarely get a look-in.
It’s telling that the other six publishers who saw the manuscript for Keshed, including imprints of two major ones, said they loved it but still turned it down, presumably because in terms of style, tone, form, content, they didn’t think it’d shift enough units to keep the shareholders in ivory back-scratchers. Yet the book got rave reviews in the TLS, Irish Times and The Spectator and sold well. What does that tell you about the way Big Publishing perceives the market?
But this isn’t about me. Forgetting Keshed, was there really not a single book produced by one of the scores of fantastic small UK presses that was deserving of a place? I’ve worked for years through my day job in libraries to promote independent publishers at national level, and know how many brilliant novels they’re offering up.
You might point to the longlist featuring Fitzcarraldo Editions, but it’s not exactly a small outfit these days. And to compare Serpent’s Tail and Granta – the two other indies on the list but nonetheless publishing heavyweights – with smaller presses like Ortac is so much of a false equivalence it’s not even worth considering.
There have been years, yes, when the prize has cast a cursory eye beyond the mainstream. In 2022, four small independents – Galley Beggar, Influx, Saraband and Sort of Books – were longlisted, of which two went on to be shortlisted. But contrast that with a global conglomerate like Penguin, which is behind the imprints of five novels nominated this year alone, and it’s clear that it’s hardly a level playing field.
There is a huge issue with diversity in mainstream publishing, and everyone knows it. The industry could go a long way in beginning to address this by using its pre-eminent prize to showcase some of the amazing work done by independent publishers, who publish so much work by ethnic global majority writers, queer or trans writers, people, like me, from working-class backgrounds, or (me again) the neurodivergent, because they judge texts primarily on their merits, not their projected sales figures.
All credit is due to my publisher, Henry Rowley, for having the conviction to publish Keshed when others saw its virtues and still backed off – and to all the other indies who work their arses off to get new writing out there for very little reward.
The small press scene is a vibrant hotbed of talent and it would be nice if the one literary prize everyone in the UK has heard of would publicly recognise this. But it won’t, because entrance to the club is invite-only, and most of us aren’t on the guest list.
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