Birmingham professor Luke Kennard shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Black Bag, a comic and absurdist novel by University of Birmingham creative writing professor Luke Kennard, has been shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

It is one of six books to make the final round, whittled down from a longlist of 13 and 163 submissions in total. The winner will be announced on Monday 9 November.

A man in a bag

Published in March 2026, Black Bag is described as "an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story". It follows an out-of-work actor who takes a strange job: sitting zipped inside an oversized bag at the back of a lecture hall for a whole autumn term, as part of a psychological experiment run by a university professor. As the experiment plays out, a professor of post-humanism finds herself asking whether it is possible to fall in love with someone hidden inside a black bag.

The judges said the most memorable thing about the novel was "the way it combines that absurd experiment with a moving story about human frailty, passion, confusion and identity".

"I'm flabbergasted and very happy," said Professor Kennard. "Probably the biggest privilege of something like this is the new readers it brings to your work."

The judging panel

The shortlist was announced at the Southbank Centre in London by the chair of judges, the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard. She is joined on the panel by poet Raymond Antrobus, musician and writer Jarvis Cocker, critic Rebecca Liu and novelist Patricia Lockwood.

Now in its 55th year, the Booker Prize is awarded to the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.