Get your diary out! The key dates for the 2022 Booker Prize have been announced.

The 2022 longlist will be announced on 26 July, the shortlist on 6 September and the winner on 17 October. More details will be revealed, all in good time.

This year, cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor (pictured) is chair the judging panel. He is joined by academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M. John Harrison; and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.

Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022. The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 longlisted books will be announced in July 2022 with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced in October 2022.

This year’s panel is composed of superb readers who have an innate understanding of the Booker’s global scope, yet are steeped in the history and literature of Britain.

Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Prize Foundation said when announcing the 2022 judges: ‘It is perhaps a little easy to forget that both Booker Prizes are international. As we’ve seen in the submissions for the Booker Prize year after year, the English language has been hugely enriched by a global sensibility – whether it’s a winning London novelist influenced by a Māori author, a Turk writing in English under the star of James Baldwin or Scots dialect first published in New York.

And the prize has a global impact: the shortlistees and winners are celebrated all over the world.

“This year’s panel is composed of superb readers who have an innate understanding of that global scope, yet are steeped in the history and literature of Britain. They are experts in the porous boundaries of genre, and in the exchange of literary traditions. I can’t wait to see what they recommend.”

It is a great privilege to survey this year’s harvest in the company of such distinguished judges, who themselves write — in a rich range of traditions — about worlds real and imagined.

Neil MacGregor, chair of the 2022 Booker Prize judges added: ‘“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”. Over the last year, as book sales surged, Joan Didion’s words were shown to be truer than ever.

A large part of the world now writes and reads those necessary stories, about who we are and who we might become, in English: so to be asked to survey this year’s harvest for the Booker Prize is to be invited to inhabit many different universes.

And it is a great privilege to be asked to do so in the company of such distinguished judges, who themselves write — in a rich range of traditions — about worlds real and imagined.’