LONDON (AP) — Marlon James and Douglas Stuart have a chance to become only the fifth author to win the Booker Prize twice after both were named Tuesday on the shortlist for arguably the U.K.’s most prestigious fiction accolade.
Judges of the award whittled down the 13 semifinalists announced in July to six on Tuesday and said the shortlisted books are “moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful.” They were selected from an original 163 submissions.
The Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland between October 2025 and Sept. 2026. The winner stands to win 50,000 pounds ($67,000) and a trophy named Iris, so-called after the 1978 winner Iris Murdoch.
“Most of these books were beginning to feel like old friends after at least two readings,” said historian Mary Beard, head of the judging panel. “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.”
The list includes James’ “The Disappearers,” about a group of gay men in his native Jamaica in what was a hostile environment in the 1980s; Stuart’s “ John of John,” a story of father-son secrets on a remote Scottish island. James won the Booker in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings” and Stuart won in 2020 for “Shuggie Bain.”
If either were to win, they would be the fifth author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice, joining J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
Also on the shortlist is Pulitzer Prize laureate Elizabeth Strout, whose heartfelt small-town tale “The Things We Never Say” once again celebrates the lives of those in her native New England. Strout’s “Oh William!” was a finalist in 2022. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for “Olive Kitteridge.”
The others on the list are British authors Rebecca Perry for Medieval-to-modern tale “May We Feed the King”; 81-year-old M. John Harrison, who would become the oldest winner of the award if his postapocalyptic tale “The End of Everything” wins; and the quirky campus novel “Black Bag” from Luke Kennard.
It’s only the second time in the past decade that men have outnumbered women on the shortlist.
Beard said the judging panel, which included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and American novelist Patricia Lockwood, concluded their deliberations “neatly propped up against one another, almost glowing.”
“These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated,” she said.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and is open to novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland. Last year’s winner was “Flesh” by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.
This year's winner will be announced on Monday, Nov. 9.
FILE - Douglas Stuart poses for a portrait on April 29, 2026, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Elizabeth Strout poses with her book, 'Tell Me Everything," in London on June 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Joanna Chan, File)
FILE - Jamaican author Marlon James poses with the award after his book, "A Brief History of Seven Killings," was named as winner of the 2015 Booker Prize for Fiction in London on Oct. 13, 2015. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)
Communications failures that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast on Monday have put the spotlight back on the aging systems that air traffic controllers rely on in the U.S.
Congress already handed the Federal Aviation Administration $12.5 billion last year to overhaul technology after the deadliest U.S. plane crash in more than two decades killed 67 people when an American Airlines flight collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River and a series of radar outages later that spring led to widespread cancellations at Newark Liberty International Airport.
The same Philadelphia facility that had the radar outages in the spring of 2025 lost both its primary and backup data lines at the same time on Monday. But that regional air traffic control center isn't alone; similar communications outages have also disrupted flights in Minneapolis and Dallas over the past year.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy quickly turned Monday's disruption that hit every major airport in the New York area into the latest example of why he's asking Congress for $20 billion more to pay for the next phase of the air traffic control overhaul. Airlines were working to recover from the outage on Tuesday, but FlightAware.com showed nearly 100 flights had been canceled by midday because a number of planes and crews were out of position after Monday's cancellations.
“I have money for some of the telecom replacing old copper wires. Bringing in new fiber so it's faster. The problem is this is a 40-year-old architecture or design,” Duffy said on Fox News Tuesday. “I need new money to do a whole new design — a new architecture of telecom so it will never go down.”
A switch on the primary communications line at the regional FAA air traffic control facility in Philadelphia failed Monday morning, but when it turned to the backup fiber optic line authorities discovered that it had been inadvertently severed by railroad construction workers. The failures left controllers without radar or communications for hours. The switch is part of the equipment scheduled to be replaced.
The outage brought commercial air traffic to a near-standstill at Newark for much of the day, with no commercial flights landing at the airport from about 9:40 a.m. to just after 5:20 p.m. local time, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
More than 200 flights into and out of Philadelphia International Airport were also canceled, while disruptions hit LaGuardia and Kennedy airports in New York. Flights had resumed by Monday evening.
T echnical problems that affect Newark Liberty Airport tend to get outsized attention because it’s a key hub for United Airlines. During the spring of 2025, controllers in Philadelphia briefly lost radar several times and then staffing shortages at the facility prompted the FAA to restrict traffic.
The Dallas outage last September disrupted American Airlines’ key hub, and last month’s communications failure at a regional air traffic control facility in Minneapolis halted flights across several Midwestern states and led to numerous diversions and delays.
Sheldon Jacobson, whose research contributed to the design of the TSA PreCheck system, said the FAA needs to make sure that its backup systems are independent of the primary line to reduce the chance that both will fail at the same time. And he said maybe the agency should look at adding a third line to have an additional backup system.
“When any one of these systems goes down, it doesn’t just affect that airport. Because these are major hubs, it affects literally dozens of other airports and literally thousands of passengers,” said Jacobson, who is an engineering professor at the University of Illinois.
The FAA says it has already replaced 3,346 communications lines and 190 voice switches across the country since the agency received what Duffy called a $12.5 billion down payment on the overhaul. But the plan also calls for redesigning the computer system that air traffic controllers rely on, shifting computing online to the cloud and adding a new AI-based system to help predict problems. Duffy says he doesn't have enough money for those projects yet.
Robert Poole, who leads transportation research at the Reason Foundation think tank he founded in the late 1970s, said the FAA needs reliable long-term funding to complete all the needed upgrades, and that is hard to get from Congress. He has long argued for spinning off air traffic control from the FAA and creating an independent agency that would be funded by ticket fees the airlines charge.
“We know what kind of technology is really needed to do that, but you can’t do that on drips and drabs of annual appropriations,” Poole said.
FILE - LaGuardia Airport's air traffic control tower, right, is shown as planes line-up for take-off, Thursday May 25, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
FILE - A traveler with a smartphone walks past an air traffic control tower at Philadelphia International Airport in Philadelphia on March 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
