Jarvis Cocker, one of the judges for this year’s Booker prize, has expressed surprise that the shortlist, announced this week, contains four male authors and only two female writers, because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”.
The Pulp frontman might be on to something. Over the past 10 years, however, seven Booker winners have been men; the number of women boosted to four by the controversial joint win between Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood in 2019. The 2024 Booker shortlist was the first to have five female authors in the prize’s history. Last year’s winner Flesh, by British-Hungarian author David Szalay, stripped what being a man means down to its bones.
This year’s contenders all approach the same question through wildly different forms: historical, domestic, dystopian and comic fiction. The novels by female authors both have male protagonists: a reluctant medieval monarch in Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King and a 57-year-old history teacher in contemporary Massachusetts in The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.
The Disappearers by Marlon James and John of John by Douglas Stuart, both previous Booker winners, show young men confronting their sexuality in the repressive climates of late 20th-century Jamaica and the Outer Hebrides, respectively. In The End of Everything from science-fiction giant M John Harrison, the central character is trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic Britain under invasion from ambiguous entities (AI is never explicitly mentioned). In Black Bag, by Luke Kennard, an out-of-work actor lands a job in which he has to wear a black bag all the time, based on a 1967 social psychology experiment in which a student was asked to wear a big black bag for a whole semester. “It’s a statement about being a man,” one character says of the eponymous bag. “There’s a whole contingent of men who are lost and dissatisfied.”
All the male characters in these novels are walking around in metaphorical black bags, flailing awkwardly in the dark, unknowable to those closest to them. Whether set in medieval times, Donald Trump’s America or a nightmarish near future, the 2026 shortlist is a reflection of current anxieties about masculinity.
Publishing is just catching up. Thanks to the so-called Sally Rooney phenomenon, the book world (if not the Booker) has been dominated by novels written by and about young women, a long overdue pushback against generations of swaggering fiction by men. The male gaze has finally shifted. As Szalay has said, “you can’t write like Martin Amis or Norman Mailer or Philip Roth now”. Notable exceptions such as Szalay and Ben Lerner, whose novel Transcription was a surprise omission from the longlist, have been steadily chronicling 21st-century manhood. But some feared that male writers and stories were being overlooked altogether. Last year, the independent publisher, Conduit Books, was set up exclusively for male authors.
The shortlist shows a renewed confidence in narratives about men. Here are fathers and sons, husbands and lovers, kings and losers, none of whom conform to male stereotypes. All of the novels are about a longing for purpose and connection. In a world where the strongman myth is mighty, the characters show vulnerability and uncertainty. As the lyrics of a 1998 Pulp song have it, they make us “start to wonder what it takes to be a man”.
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