An especially international Booker Prize for Fiction longlist features many writers, as Gaby Wood points out, with sustained careers.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

See also, from last year’s Booker Prize for Fiction:
2024: Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’ Wins the £50,000 Booker Prize for Fiction
2024: The UK’s £50,000 Booker Prize for Fiction Names Its 2024 Shortlist
2024: The UK’s Booker Prize for Fiction 2024 Longlist

‘An Ear for Wit’

The longlist being released today (July 29) by the Booker Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom comprises the work of authors from four continents and nine nations: Albania; Canada; Hungary; India; Malaysia; Trinidad and Tobago; the United Kingdom; Ukraine; and the United States.

This makes it one of the most international of Booker Prize for Fiction longlists in a decade, organizers say. (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.)

You may recall that 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, and initial responses from many in the United Kingdom were not kind.

However, this broad international range of storytellers speaks for itself in the bracing diversity of such a list—even as writers from the United Kingdom have attracted more longlistings than those from any other country.

The award’s 2024 laureate is Samantha Harvey, whose Orbital is from Penguin Random House/Jonathan Cape.

The winner of this, the flagship award in the Booker Foundation’s work, receives £50,000 (US$66,825). Each of the six authors eventually shortlisted is to receive £2,500 (US$3,341) and a specially bound edition of her or his book.

The 13-title list returns four Booker-nominated authors to contention, with the remaining nine writers on the list being new to the competition.

One of them is India’s Kiran Desai, who is being nominated 19 years after her previous book, The Inheritance of Loss, won the prize in 2006.

Her first win is published in the United States by Grove Atlantic and in the United Kingdom by Penguin Random House / Hamish Hamilton.

Winning this year would be quite a feat, as only four authors have previously won the honor twice.

Another is the Bristol-born Andrew Miller, whose Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001. Many readers know him for Pure, his 2011 Costa Book of the Year award-winner.

His longlisted The Land in Winter, like Oxygen, is published in the UK by Hachette UK / Sceptre. The Land in Winter, released in late 2024, is his 10th novel. His most recent release before this one, The Slowworm’s Song, was named a best book by both The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal.

Many readers’ introduction to Miller’s distinctive work was his Ingenious Pain, which won the 1997 Tait Black Prize for Fiction and is reported to have been sold into 36 languages. Easily among the most accomplished writers even on this list—in which, as Booker’s Gaby Wood points out, most contenders “have already had sustained careers—Miller saw his The Land in Winter pick up wins in both the Winston Graham Prize for Historical Fiction and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction last month.

Four of the longlisted titles this year are under 200 pages long in their print editions, while the new Desai book comprises 667 in print.

Five of these longlisted titles are published by Penguin Random House. The venerable independent house Faber has three longlisted books. Fitzcarraldo Editions has its first Booker Prize for Fiction longlisting, but has been in contention for the International Booker Prize 16 times.

James Daunt‘s Daunt Books Publishing Originals—which produced last year’s longlisted Headshot by the American author Rita Bullwinkel—is on the longlist this year with Misinterpretation by the Albanian-American writer Ledia Xhoga.

The 2025 Booker Prize for Fiction Longlist

Author	Author Nationality	Title	UK and/or Irish Publisher / Imprint
Claire Adam	Trinidadian	Love Farms	Faber
Tash Aw	Malaysian	The South	HarperCollins / 4th Estate
Natasha Brown	British	Universality	Faber
Jonathan Buckley	British	One Boat	Fitzcarraldo Editions
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
Maria Reva	Canadian-Ukrainian	Endling	Hachette / Virago
David Szalay	Hungarian-British	Flesh	Penguin Random House / Jonathan Cape
Benjamin Wood	British	Seascraper	Penguin Random House / Viking
Ledia Xhoga	Albanian-American	Misinterpretation	Daunt Books Publishing Originals

The 2025 Jury

Author Roddy Doyle is the first Booker Prize for Fiction winner to chair the Booker jury. He won the 1993 Booker for “The Barrytown Trilogy’s” The Commitments, The Snapper, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He’s joined on the jury by:

• Novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, who was longlisted for A Spell of Good Things in the Booker Prize for Fiction competition of 2023;
• Actor, producer, and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, who is on the board of the New York City Ballet and has won four Golden Globes, three Screen Actors Guild awards, and two Emmys;
• Writer, broadcaster, and literary critic Chris Power; and
• Kiely Reid, who was longlisted for a Booker in 2020 for her debut publication, Such a Fun Age from Penguin Random House’s GP Putnam’s Sons.

In a comment on today’s release of the longlist, Doyle is quoted saying, in part, “Seven months, 153 books—the five judges have met and decided on the 13 novels that make up the 2025 Booker longlist.

“It wasn’t easy; at times, it was agony. There were so many contenders, so many excellent books, saying goodbye to some of them felt personal, almost cruel. But I loved every minute of the experience, and being in the company of my fellow judges.

“There was a small, discreet UN peace-keeping force close at hand, but it wasn’t needed. My four colleagues are a generous, funny group but what was clear from the outset was that these are people who love—actually, who need—great books.

“Every decision was carefully measured; each of our books was examined with skill, wisdom and affection. …

“At the end of our last, very long meeting, when we’d added the final book to the heap, we all felt relieved, elated – and maybe a bit proud.”

And the Booker Foundation’s CEO Gaby Wood returns to the theme of the experience embraced by this longlist.

“There are two debut novelists on the list,” she says, “yet others have written five books, or 10 or 12 or 13.”

 And while the list, she says, “includes historical epics, brilliant formal experiments and a compact satire, many of the novels speak to the reader in an unadorned, confiding voice. This intimate effect, so difficult to achieve, was immediately appreciated by the judges, who are as alive to un-showy skills as they are to more virtuosic ones.”

Attending monthly meetings with the 2025 Booker jurors, Wood says, “has been, quite frankly, more fun than any job deserves to be. The judges are joyous, careful, committed readers with an ear for wit and a knack for listening to each other.”

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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.