In complex auditory environments, selective attention enables individuals to priorities relevant acoustic information while minimising interference from surrounding distractors. However, it remains unclear whether advance knowledge about distractor’s location can facilitate selective listening through top-down inhibitory processes. In this study, twenty-eight participants performed a binaural listening task categorizing the magnitude of an auditory target stimulus (number word) presented from one of four loudspeaker locations, with an interfering distractor simultaneously presented in 66% of trials. In half of the blocks, the distractor location was spatially cued before stimulus onset, enabling proactive inhibition of a potential distractor location. To assess distractor interference during target processing, we manipulated the congruency between the target and distractor stimuli at the response level. In addition to distractor presence (distractor presence vs. absence), cueing (cued vs. uncued), target-distractor congruency (congruent vs. incongruent stimuli), also the cue-stimulus interval (CSI: 200, 800, 1500 ms) was systematically manipulated to assess preparatory top-down inhibition. Results showed that distractor presence impaired overall listening performance, particularly when the target and distractor elicited incongruent responses compared to congruent responses (i.e., congruency effect). Spatial cueing of the distractor location improved performance on distractor-present trials, suggesting that prior knowledge of the distractor location facilitates selective listening. This benefit of distractor cueing, however, was dependent on preparation time, with improvements observed only at longer CSIs. Notably, cueing did not influence performance in distractor-absent trials, ruling out cue-induced target enhancement. These findings suggest that foreknowledge about the distractor’s location supports auditory selective attention through a top-down inhibitory mechanism.