‘Brilliantly human’ Booker Prize 2025 shortlist showcases authors who have spent decades honing their craft
Today, Tuesday, 23 September, the 2025 shortlist for the Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction, is announced
The shortlist of six books has been selected by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. Doyle, who is the first Booker Prize winner to chair a Booker judging panel, is joined by Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid.
Featuring both classical storytelling and novels that push the boundaries of narrative form, the shortlist is preoccupied with the ties that bind families together. The characters navigate familiar domestic situations: the power dynamic shifts between parents and their children, marriages come adrift, families reckon with the weight of their own history, and individuals perform the roles others expect them to play. Together, the shortlisted books transport readers from Hungary to Japan, from Italy to the US, from India to England, and feature often rootless characters far from the places they once called home. The books take place over vastly differing time spans: some over the course of just a few days or weeks; others over several decades.
The books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 are:
- Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi (American)
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton) by Kiran Desai (Indian)
- Audition (Fern Press) by Katie Kitamura (American)
- The Rest of Our Lives (Faber) by Ben Markovits (American)
- The Land in Winter (Sceptre) by Andrew Miller (British)
- Flesh (Jonathan Cape) by David Szalay (Hungarian-British)
The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize FoundationIn 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 judges’ selection features:
- Writers deep into their literary careers: five out of the six have more than five books to their name; two with more than 10; and one whose third was 20 years in the making
- Authors representing four nationalities across three continents
- Previous Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai, past shortlistees Andrew Miller and David Szalay, and three authors who make their Booker Prize shortlist debut
- Classical storytelling and novels that push the boundaries of narrative form
- Novels that range in length; from one under 200 pages taking place over a few months, through to an almost 700-page love story spanning years
- Books written by a trained ballerina, a black belt in aikido, and a former professional basketball player
- Authors who are ‘in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise’ to create books that are ‘brilliantly written and brilliantly human’, according to Roddy Doyle, Chair of the 2025 judges
The prize has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over 50 years, shaping the canon of 20th and 21st century literature. This year’s selection, which was chosen from ‘the Booker Dozen’ of 13 titles, selected from 153 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500, a specially bound edition of their book, and gain global readerships and an increase in profile and sales.
For the first time, the shortlist was announced by the judges at a public event, held at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London. During the evening event the judges, in conversation with Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood, revealed what it is like to judge one of the world’s most significant literary awards, and why each book earned its place on the 2025 shortlist. The event also featured actors Louise Brealey (Sherlock, Back, Such Brave Girls) and Alfred Enoch (Harry Potter films, How to Get Away with Murder, The Couple Next Door) reading unpublished judges’ correspondence from the Booker Prize archive, as well as excerpts from the shortlisted books. The event was livestreamed on the Southbank Centre’s website and can be watched here for the next week.
The Booker Prize 2025 ceremony will take place on the evening of Monday, 10 November at Old Billingsgate in London and will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts programme Front Row at 9.30pm. The ceremony will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ social channels. The winner will receive £50,000, a trophy named Iris (after 1978 winner Iris Murdoch) and can expect their career to be transformed.
The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize FoundationRoddy Doyle, Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, says:
‘Re-reading all 13 books on the longlist was a huge pleasure; 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, savour 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.
‘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.’
The Booker Prize 2025 judges: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power, Kiley Reid, Roddy Doyle and Sarah Jessica Parker, photographed at Fortnum & Mason in London
© Tom Pilston for Booker Prize FoundationGaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds:
‘Over time, the Booker Prize has rewarded debut authors, authors developing their late style and authors at many stages in between – all writing world-class fiction. It is striking that the writers on this year’s powerful shortlist have spent decades honing their craft. They are already much loved by readers and critics, writers of enormous commitment, curiosity and skill. It’s a pleasure to see their latest books added to the almost 700 in the Booker Library.
‘Behind the scenes (as I hope readers witnessed during the shortlist announcement event at the Royal Festival Hall), the 2025 Booker judges have been fantastic company – for each other and for the books. They have undertaken the task of reading 153 novels – and re-reading their 13-strong longlist – with warmth, humour and very high standards. They are a stellar group: easy to be around and hard to impress. All of the authors nominated this year should feel very proud.’
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation
© Neo Gilder for the Booker Prize FoundationIn 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. The Foundation has created the series of six two-minute films for its two annual prizes since 2022. The films, released in spring and autumn, have become one of the highlights of the Booker Prizes seasons, with the 2024 films viewed online more than 83 million times. They can be viewed here.
This year’s Booker Prize campaign, ‘Fiction worth talking about’, is a celebration of the act of reading – and discussing – great books together. The campaign 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.
The Booker Prize Foundation has announced a partnership with BookKind, the new online bookshop that donates 10% of every sale to charity. Through the partnership, 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. The partnership will also feature special collaborations, including an exclusive Booker Prize 2025 shortlist bundle, offering readers 30% off the RRP, which can be purchased here.
Fortnum & Mason, the world’s most famous cornershop, is generously hosting this year’s judging panel at its flagship London Piccadilly store for the key judging meetings. The judges will return in November to choose their winner.
Shortlisted authors rich in experience
The shortlist of six authors represent three continents and four countries: America, Britain, Hungary and India. Several of them have lived in multiple countries, reflected in novels that encapsulate a range of international experiences. Several of the books explore the challenges of immigrant life with protagonists often caught between nations.
The list features Booker Prize alumni, including one former winner, with three titles out of the six by previously shortlisted authors. Although three make the shortlist with their first Booker nominated titles, all six have well established literary careers: five have five or more books to their name, including two with more than 10, and all have spent decades as professional writers. Two have written children’s books (Susan Choi, Ben Markovits), three are critically acclaimed and award-winning short story writers (Susan Choi, Andrew Miller, David Szalay), and one is a former BBC radio drama writer (David Szalay). Many bring varied life experiences to their storytelling, from a trained ballerina (Katie Kitamura), to a fact checker for the New Yorker (Susan Choi), to a financial advertising sales executive in the City (David Szalay), through to a black belt in aikido (Andrew Miller), and a former professional basketball player (Ben Markovits).
Kiran Desai, returns to the shortlist with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her third book and her first since her Booker Prize 2006-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. She spent almost 20 years writing it and at nearly 700 pages, it is the longest book on this year’s list – though an earlier draft clocked in at 5,000 pages. Should she win this year, she would become the fifth double winner in the prize’s 56-year history, joining Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel, and India would secure an unprecedented clean sweep of 2025’s Booker Prizes, after author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for their short-story collection Heart Lamp earlier this year. Born and brought up in New Delhi, India, Desai moved to England with her family at 15 before moving to America, where she has since lived. She has family history with the prize: her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times.
Two other writers on this year’s list have been nominated for the Booker before:
Andrew Miller was shortlisted in 2001 for Oxygen. He won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 1997 for Ingenious Pain, the Costa Book Award in 2011 for Pure, and in 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Land in Winter, his 10th novel, won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and was included in the Guardian, the Independent and Good Housekeeping’s best books of 2024 round-ups. Miller is currently shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2025 for ‘Rain – a history’. He was born in the West Country of England, and has lived in Spain and Japan – where he taught TEFL – as well as France and Ireland. He now lives in Somerset.
Hungarian-British writer David Szalay, who was born in Canada and has lived in Lebanon, Belgium, Hungary, the UK, and now Vienna, was shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is, which was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and George Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Szalay won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes in 2008 for his first novel, London and the South-East. He was included in The Telegraph’s 2010 list of the top 20 British writers under 40 and was a Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013. In 2019 he won the Edge Hill Prize for his short story collection Turbulence. Flesh, his sixth work of fiction, was selected in the Guardian and Daily Telegraph best books to read in 2025 and in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Sunday Times summer holiday reads features. The Sunday Times called Szalay ‘the kind of author who makes you want to write fiction’.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize FoundationThe three authors making their Booker Prize nomination debut this year, at both longlist and shortlist stage, are all critically acclaimed and award-winning:
Susan Choi’s shortlisted novel Flashlight, her sixth book, began life as a short story published in The New Yorker, which went on to win the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. Choi, who was born in Indiana to a Korean father and Russian-Jewish mother, originally intended Flashlight to be a novella. At just under 450 pages, the novel moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America and the North Korean regime. Choi’s debut novel The Foreign Student won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, whilst her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction and was a bestseller in the US. In 2010, Choi was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. She has been described by The New York Times as ‘a major world writer’ with ‘a profound gift’.
London-based Ben Markovits, who grew up in Texas, the UK and Germany, is a former professional basketball player, described by The Spectator as ‘one of America’s premier writers’. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016 for You Don’t Have to Live Like This. The Rest of Our Lives is Markovits’ 11th novel for adults. It was included in The Week’s best novels to read in 2025 and the Financial Times best summer books of 2025. Other novels in his backlist include a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron. He has published essays, stories, poetry and reviews in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta, the Paris Review and the New York Times, among others, and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. The Telegraph has asserted that Markovits writes novels of midlife disappointment ‘arguably better than anyone else’.
Katie Kitamura is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and the author of five books, including Audition, which is set to be made into a feature film by the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground Productions, starring Lucy Liu, Charles Melton and Lulu Wang. Her previous novel, Intimacies, won France’s Prix Littéraire Lucien Barrière in 2023 and was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, as well as one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2021. A trained ballerina, Kitamura grew up in California and Japan, before moving to the UK to undertake a PhD in American Literature. She now lives in New York, where she teaches on New York University’s graduate creative writing programme as well as working as a writer, art critic and journalist. Her work has been translated into 24 languages.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize FoundationA shortlist dominated by Penguin Random House titles
Penguin Random House (PRH) racks up the most nominations, with four out of the six published by PRH imprints, including Audition, which is the first novel from Vintage imprint Fern Press. PRH’s Vintage division has two other shortlisted titles from its Jonathan Cape imprint: Flashlight and Flesh; as well as one for Hamish Hamilton (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny). If Flashlight or Flesh win it would be the tenth Booker Prize winner for Jonathan Cape, including last year’s winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
Faber is representing the indies on the list, securing its place with The Rest of Our Lives. Faber has published seven previous Booker winners, most recently Anna Burns’ Milkman in 2018. Hodder & Stoughton imprint Sceptre is seeking to win the prize for the first time with The Land in Winter, having published six Booker-shortlisted novels, including last year’s Stone Yard Devotional.
What the authors and judges said
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Susan Choi said: ‘The inspiration for Flashlight was a combination of being haunted by childhood memories of a trip to Japan – that was not catastrophic but was still very disruptive – and by stories about the unexplained disappearances, in the late 1970s, of ordinary Japanese people, including a schoolgirl not much older than me. I feel lucky in that this moment does turn out to be a very receptive one for a story about ordinary people facing extraordinary, often malevolent forces.’
The judges said: ‘A family drama and geopolitical thriller about a fascinating episode from history. This is one of those books that completely dominates your thoughts.’
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai said: ‘I wanted to write a story about love and loneliness in the modern world, a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty. As I wrote across geographies and generations, I realised that I could widen the scope of my novel, to write about loneliness in a much broader sense. Not just romantic loneliness, but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world – all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness.’
The judges said: ‘An intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other. Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all.’
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura said: ‘The starting point for Audition was a desire to write about the long process through which children must necessarily grow up to become strangers to their own parents. Reading the book requires holding two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and. As a culture, we’re becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads. And yet we live in a time of profound and increasing cognitive dissonance.’
The judges said: ‘A brilliantly tense, taut novel that sees an actress’s life turned inside out and leaves a lot open to interpretation. What’s real? Audition makes existential detectives of us all.’
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize FoundationThe Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Ben Markovits said: ‘A few years ago, I had an idea for the opening line, then sat down and wrote the first page (more or less), and put it aside. Later, I came back to it. My kids were getting older and I wanted to write something about a certain period of family life coming to an end. When I started working on the novel I had symptoms nobody could diagnose and put that in the book, too – it seemed like a useful symbol of what happens to you in middle age, the gradual decline that you can’t quite understand.’
The judges said: ‘A road trip chronicle, a book about sickness, a basketball novel, a family saga, and a story about how we say goodbye, with a ridiculously relatable narrator.’
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Andrew Miller said: ‘The Land in Winter is inspired by an anecdote of my mother’s that rattled around in my head for many years. Also, a wish to reach back to a period that was right at the furthest stretch of what I could in any way claim to remember. And to try to make a certain kind of novel – lots of flow and momentum, and full of narrative pleasures.’
The judges said: ‘A novel about how to live, and about the tensions within marriages, set against the most dramatic winter in living memory. It’s a joy to read, a nerve-shredding pleasure.’
Flesh by David Szalay
David Szalay said: ‘I knew I wanted to write a book with a Hungarian end and an English end, since I was living very much between the two countries at the time. It would be, to some extent, a novel about contemporary Europe, and about the cultural and economic divides that characterise it. I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world – whatever divides us, we all share that.’
The judges said: ‘A novel about class ascension and a man who is remarkably detached from his desires, and a disquisition on the art of being alive. It is also an absolute page-turner.’
Flesh by David Szalay
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize FoundationThe prize’s impact
The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.
The 2024 winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey sold over 20,000 print copies in the UK in the week following its win on 12 November 2024, making it the fastest selling winner of the Booker Prize since records began. It was the bestselling title in the UK that week, topping the Audible audio and Amazon physical and eBook charts. Sales through Waterstones were more than double the volume of each of the last decade’s winners, up 3,000% the day after the announcement.
The UK publisher of Orbital, Vintage, reprinted 250,000 copies in response to the sales demand following its Booker Prize win and it remained top of the mass market fiction chart for eight consecutive weeks. Total sales of Vintage’s edition of Orbital across all formats and including its export markets and exclusive territories (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India) are now almost 750,000. That includes 357,000 copies of the hardback and paperback editions sold in the UK, up 3,867% since the book’s longlisting. Translation rights deals increased from eight before Orbital’s longlisting to a current total of 44 territories.
Samantha Harvey, winner of the Booker Prize 2024
© David Parry for the Booker Prize FoundationForthcoming public shortlist events
The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival: 4pm, Saturday, 11 October 2025
Join Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, for Cheltenham Festival’s annual introduction to the six shortlisted books and their authors, who will join the event both in-person and virtually.
Tickets can be booked at cheltenhamfestivals.org
Shortlist Readings: Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, 8pm GMT, Sunday, 9 November 2025
The prize’s annual shortlist readings featuring the authors in conversation at Southbank Centre are returning for the 2025 prize season and will take place on Sunday, 9 November in the Royal Festival Hall, chaired by award-winning novelist and former Booker Prize judge Sara Collins. Tickets can be booked at southbankcentre.co.uk.
Meet the Booker Prize 2025 winner: Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 6pm GMT, Thursday, 13 November 2025
The newly crowned winner of the Booker Prize 2025 will be appearing at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle for their first and only public event in the week following their win, run in partnership with New Writing North. The event will feature the winner in conversation with the founder and Chief Executive of New Writing North, Claire Malcolm. Forum bookshop will be selling books at the venue, giving audience members the chance to get a signed copy of the winning book after the event.
Tickets go on sale via Tyneside Cinema on Friday, 26 September 2025
Details of all Booker Prize events can be found here.
Shahidha Bari with International Booker Prize 2024 authors and translators at the shortlist readings event at Southbank Centre, London
© David Parry for the Booker Prize FoundationFor media enquiries, please contact:
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