RAYE and Olivia Dean are back on the Mercury list. Will a returning artist win?

What happened

The 2026 Mercury Prize’s twelve Albums of the Year were announced on Thursday 30 July on BBC Radio 6 Music, with the awards show set for Thursday 22 October at the Utilita Arena, Newcastle.

The winner is named on 22 October in Newcastle, the second year the ceremony is held in the city. Twelve albums are on the shortlist, and the judges pick one.

The twelve are Dave’s The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dove Ellis’s Blizzard, Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream, JADE’s That’s Showbiz Baby!, Knats’s A Great Day In Newcastle, Kojey Radical’s Don’t Look Down, Nia Archives’s Emotional Junglist, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving, Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane, RAYE’s This Music May Contain Hope, Suede’s Antidepressants and War Child’s HELP(2).

Seven of the twelve have been on the shortlist before. Dave won in 2019 and Suede in 1993. Florence + the Machine is on her fourth nomination, and RAYE, Kojey Radical, Nia Archives and Olivia Dean are on their second.

Four of them were shortlisted in the last five years, which is the period the first market uses. Kojey Radical was on the 2022 list for Reason to Smile, Olivia Dean and RAYE in 2023, and Nia Archives in 2024.

The prize has spent most of its life in London. Last year Sam Fender, a songwriter from North Shields, won it in Newcastle in front of a home crowd, and one of this year’s albums has Newcastle in its name. The markets below do not ask whether this matters to the judges.

Sources: Mercury Prize (2), BBC, Guardian, Official Charts, BBC

The Pattern

Four of the last eight winners had been on the list before. We checked each winner from 2018 to 2025 in the BBC’s report of the ceremony, and asked whether the artist had been shortlisted in the five years before. Over the whole history of the prize, the BBC notes that twenty of its 34 winners to 2025 won with a first album.

The Read

For the first market, history is close to even. Four of the twelve albums pass the five-year rule, so a winner picked at random would pass it a third of the time. The last eight winners passed it half the time. With so few cases, those two numbers are too close to say the judges lean either way. The record does show that coming back is no handicap. Wolf Alice, Kiwanuka, Simz and Fender all won with a later album than the one first shortlisted.

The McCartney market is where the prize’s own history argues hardest. Twenty of 34 winners to 2025 won with a first album. The last four winners were a rapper, a soul singer, a jazz septet and a Newcastle songwriter, and in 2024 the judges passed over Charli xcx’s BRAT for a first album.

The returning-artist market fails if the judges pick Dave, Florence + the Machine or Suede, who were shortlisted before 2021 and so fall outside the market’s five years. It also fails with a first-timer such as Dove Ellis. The McCartney market turns on the same habit of choosing the less obvious name. The answer comes on 22 October.