Image: Booker Prize Foundation, Yuki Sugiura
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
London’s Booker Prize for Fiction: The 2025 Longlist
Translation: First Winners of a New PEN-and-Booker Program
Authors ‘in Total Command’
Chosen by this year’s jurors from their longlist of July 29, the six books shortlisted this evening (September 23) for the 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom have been drawn from the initial pool of 153 submitted titles and then the 13 longlisted entries.
The shortlist has been announced at an event staged in Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Center, making it a more public moment than it has been in the past, with jurors joining Booker Prize Foundation CEO Gaby Wood to talk about their selection process and actors on-hand to read excerpts. A recording of the Southbank event is to be made available for the next week, and you should be able to watch it here.
The winner is to be named on November 10 at London’s Old Billingsgate, with a broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row at 9:30 p.m. GMT. (The United Kingdom will have left British Summer Time, BST, on October 26.)
The winner of this, the flagship award in the Booker Foundation’s work, receives £50,000 (US$67,574). Each of the six authors eventually shortlisted is to receive £2,500 (US$3,378) and a specially bound edition of her or his book.
“The books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with—to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from—other people.”Roddy Doyle
And this is an interesting shortlist, not least because it seems to have a focus on careers that are well underway. As the Booker team puts it,
- Five of the six authors have more than five books each to their names; and
- Two of these authors have more than 10 books each to their names.
This cast of veterans has much to show in terms of previous Booker attention, as well: Kiran Desai is a former Booker winner—for her The Inheritance of Loss, the Mann Booker-winner in 2006 (Grove Atlantic in the States and in the United Kingdom Penguin Random House / Hamish Hamilton). Andrew Miller and David Szalay are previous Booker shortlistees.
The shortlist’s keen gender diversity isn’t mentioned by the foundation, but as it has happened, the jury’s selections have created a fine 50-50 split: three women, three men. Let’s just take this excellent chance to say that that is diversity, folks. A good jury does not, and should not, be encumbered with counting males and females on their lists, and such a thing certainly did not happen here. But when this even split does occur, isn’t it interesting that we’re rather slow to say so?
A list heavily weighted toward women will frequently be touted as such and often praised as “diverse.” But a balanced list?—how rarely you see a competition regime point with pride to such authentic diversity when it occurs. And isn’t that a remarkable clue to where we’ve all come in one of our more persistently difficult societal challenges?
Otherwise, there are four nationalities represented here from three continents—Indian, British, Hungarian, and American—as identified to the Booker by these authors’ publishers.
For our internationalist readership, the Booker Prize for Fiction is not to be confused, of course, with the International Booker Prize, which is focused on translation.
The Booker Prize for Fiction opened to non-British submissions for the first time in 2014, allowing authors from any country, including the United States, to be eligible, as long as their novels were written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The award had originally been open only to writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland, and Zimbabwe.
The shortlisted authors’ novels run from under 200 pages to nearly 700 pages.
The Re-Reading Question
During an interesting invitational press briefing this morning, a canny question from BBC media editor Katie Razzall brought up a point about the process used by many juries in book awards: re-reading a jury’s top picks.
As Razzall said, “The Booker is always about books that have been read many times [before] the decision is made. But the rest of the population doesn’t read books like that. We mainly read them once. And sometimes it makes me wonder whether you end up making a decision based on different criteria from [those of] the rest of us.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, a member of the jury, picked up on that and agreed with Razzall, saying that she’d considered this, too. While pointing out that she does know some people who re-read books, Parker said that this isn’t common for her as a consumer, and she’d been conscious of thinking “what it feels like to get a book, perhaps for the first and only time,” rather than re-reading during a shortlist selection process or another stage. “I think we’re very conscious of exactly what you’re saying,” she said to Razzall, “because it’s not an academic exercise for the reader the way it has been, in some ways, for us.”
While there was no pejorative component in Razzall and Parker’s exchange, it was interesting to hear a point raised that reflects how some of the common (and understandable) procedures of juries may, in fact, not reflect the way consumers tend to handle content.
The 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction Shortlist
| Author | Author Nationality, as provided by the publisher | Title | UK and/or Irish Publisher / Imprint |
| Susan Choi | American | Flashlight | Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape |
| Kiran Desai | Indian | The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny | Penguin Random House / Hamish Hamilton |
| Katie Kitamura | American | Audition | Penguin Random House / Fern Press |
| Ben Markovits | American | The Rest of Our Lives | Faber |
| Andrew Miller | British | The Land in Winter | Hachette / Hodder & Stoughton / Sceptre |
| David Szalay | Hungarian-British | Flesh | Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape |
Novels ‘That No One Else Could Have Written’
In his statement of rationale, the affable jury chair Roddy Doyle actually mentions the re-reading function, bringing that point to mind again.
“‘Re-reading all 13 books on the longlist was a huge pleasure,” he says. “I was feeling the excitement, the joy I’ve felt since I started reading books with no pictures in them 60 years ago. As judges, we could re-examine, savor and admire them without having to worry about the boxes of unread novels that were waiting to trip us every time we got up to fill the kettle. Some books seemed to grow. Others remained excellent, exactly as we’d left them.
Roddy Doyle
“Pleasure stopped about halfway through the meeting to decide the shortlist. We continued to laugh, to listen to one another, to shuffle the remaining books, seeing similarities and differences, strengths and uniqueness. But in whittling the 13 down to six, there was sadness, even guilt at losing books we loved. But also satisfaction and gratitude: we had chosen six great novels.
‘The six have, I think, two big things in common. Their authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written. And all of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with—to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from—other people. In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human.”
Wood, the Booker Foundation CEO, points to some of the fast-growing suite of promotional elements mounted by the Booker program, saying, “In early October, ahead of the Booker Prize 2025 winner announcement, the Booker Prize Foundation will release a series of short films featuring high-profile actors performing extracts from the shortlisted books. . . .
Gaby Wood
“This year’s Booker Prize campaign,” she says—’Fiction Worth Talking About’—”is designed to encourage readers to explore the nominated books, share their thoughts, and connect with others from around the world over their love of great fiction. Videos with the judges can be viewed on the Booker Prize Instagram channel.” . . .
She mentions a new arrangement with the online retailer BookKind, which donates a portion of sales to charity. “Through the partnership,” Wood writes, “customers shopping at BookKind can now choose to support the Booker Prize Foundation directly, helping fund its work to ensure that literature is a vital and inclusive part of the cultural landscape.”
And Wood notes that Fortnum & Mason “is generously hosting this year’s judging panel at its flagship Piccadilly store for the key judging meetings.”
The 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction jurors at Fortnum & Mason in Picadilly Circus. From left, they are Chris Power, Sarah Jessica Parker, Roddy Doyle, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, and Kiley Reid. Image: Booker Foundation, Neo Gilder
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Booker Prize for Fiction is here. More on the International Booker Prize is here, more from Publishing Perspectives on both Booker Prize programs is here. And more from us on the international industry’s many book and publishing awards programs overall is here.
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