Mary Beard to chair Booker
Mary Beard — the classicist and broadcaster — is serving as chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judging panel. She has also been talking about her new book as an accessible entry point for readers who haven’t thought much about the classics. (irishtimes.com)
Mary Beard is chairing the five-member judging panel for the 2026 Booker Prize, the fiction award that will name its winner in November. (thebookerprizes.com) The Booker Prize Foundation announced the panel on December 11, 2025, as submissions opened for the 2026 prize year. Beard is joined by poet Raymond Antrobus, musician and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker, journalist Rebecca Liu and novelist Patricia Lockwood. (thebookerprizes.com) The 2026 winner will receive £50,000, and each of the six shortlisted authors will receive £2,500. The Booker Prize website says the winner is due to be announced in November 2026. (thebookerprizes.com) Beard is best known as a classicist rather than a novelist, and the Booker described her as an author and broadcaster who taught classics at Cambridge for more than 30 years. Her books include *SPQR*, *Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town* and *Emperor of Rome*. (thebookerprizes.com) Her appointment extends the Booker’s habit of building judging panels that mix novelists with critics, journalists and public figures from outside fiction. The 2025 panel, for example, was chaired by Roddy Doyle and included Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Power, Kiley Reid and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. (thebookerprizes.com) At the same time, Beard is publishing a new book, *Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old*, on April 16, 2026. Profile Books says it is aimed at explaining “why the classics matter” through objects, texts and stories from the ancient world. (profilebooks.com) Profile describes the book as a guide for readers who want an entry point into Greek and Roman material without specialist training. That fits Beard’s public role over the past two decades as a scholar who has written and broadcast for mass audiences as well as academic ones. (profilebooks.com; thebookerprizes.com) On the Booker site, Beard said she was “hugely looking forward” to the job, while adding that she is “quite a slow reader” and would need to speed up. By November, that reading will help decide which novel joins David Szalay’s *Flesh*, the 2025 winner, on the prize’s roll call. (thebookerprizes.com; thebookerprizes.com)
