The Booker Prize is a literary award conferred each year for the best novel written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Booker Prize shortlist 2023 features six books by authors never previously shortlisted, including two debuts.

Novelist Esi Edugyan, twice-shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is the chair of the 2023 judging panel and is joined by actor, writer and director Adjoa Andoh; poet, lecturer, editor and critic Mary Jean Chan; Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Shakespeare specialist James Shapiro; and actor and writer Robert Webb. 
The judges are looking for the best work of long-form fiction, written in English, selected from entries published in the UK and Ireland between October 1 2022 and September 30 2023.
The shortlist of six books was announced on September 21, 2023, at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The 6 books featured on the shortlist:

- The Bee Sting by Paul Murray: A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

- Western Lane by Chetna Maroo: Chetna Maroo's tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl's struggle to transcend herself – and squash

- Prophet Song by Paul Lynch: A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink

- This Other Eden by Paul Harding: Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference

- If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery: An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques

- Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein: In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator