Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

The Booker Prize for Fiction is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The shortlist for The 2020 Booker Prize was announced in September 2020. This year’s longlist of 13 books was selected by a panel of five judges from 162 novels published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2019 and 30 September 2020.


  • This Mournable Body

    This Mournable Body

    The hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation leads us on a journey to discover where lives go after hope has departed.

  • Burnt Sugar

    Burnt Sugar

    This is a love story and a story about betrayal, picking the slippery cords of memory and myth that bind two women together, and hold them apart.

  • The New Wilderness

    The New Wilderness

    From an acclaimed Guardian First Book Award finalist comes a debut novel ‘brutal and beautiful in equal measure’.

  • The Shadow King

    The Shadow King

    The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.

  • Shuggie Bain

    Shuggie Bain

    Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride.

  • Real Life

    Real Life

    Elegant, brutal and startlingly intimate, Real Life is a campus novel about learning to live from an electric new voice in fiction.