The International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist provides a ‘miraculous lens through which to view human experience’

The shortlist of six books – five novels and one collection of short stories – has been chosen by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. Porter is joined by prize-winning poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton.  

The selection celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025, as judged by the 2025 panel. The judges have whittled down their shortlist from a longlist of 13, selected from 154 books submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was launched in its current format in 2016. 

The International Booker Prize recognises the vital work of translation, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the winning author and translator. Each shortlisted title will be awarded a prize of £5,000: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator. In championing works from around the world that have originated in a wide range of languages, the prize fosters an engaged global community of writers and readers whose experiences and interests transcend national borders.  

The announcement of the winning book for 2025 will take place on Tuesday, 20 May 2025 at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The announcement will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes social media channels.  

The shortlisted books feature stories that capture the indomitability of the human spirit, from AI ‘mothers’ parenting manufactured children in a futuristic world to the resilience of girls and women in patriarchal communities in southern India; from a protagonist forced to relive the same day over and over to the distress calls of migrants on a small boat in the Channel; from the agony and joy of lifelong friendship in the shadow of mental illness to a couple’s search for meaningful connections in their digitally curated lives. 

Whilst the nominated titles each tackle weighty themes, they are brief in length: four of the shortlisted works are under 200 pages long, with Perfection and Small Boat just over 100 pages. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is the longest book on the list, at 278 pages. On the Calculation of Volume I is the first in a planned septology, which was originally self-published in Denmark before becoming a word-of-mouth sensation.   

‘This shortlist is the result of a life-enhancing conversation between myself and my fellow judges. Reading 154 books in six months made us feel like high-speed Question Machines hurtling through space. Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.  

‘This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.  

‘We haven’t chosen these six books because we are book experts who think people need to be told what to read. We have chosen them because we need them, we found them, and we love them. We need literature that shocks, delights and baffles and reveals how weird many of us feel about the way we are living now. Ultimately, these books widen the view. They enhance the quality of conversation we are all having. They don’t shut down debate, they generate it. They don’t have all the answers, but they ask extraordinary questions.’  

A feast of fiction from around the world

This year, the Booker Prize Foundation launched a marketing campaign for the prize, ‘A feast of fiction from around the world’, which features a series of engaging videos to introduce readers to the nominated books and the judges. Watch here.  

It will once again publish six short films featuring high-profile actors performing extracts from the shortlisted books during the week commencing 21 April. The shortlist films created for the Booker Prizes in 2024 have been viewed online more than 83 million times. 

Literary success years in the making 

Many of the nominated books on the list are decades in the making – some of the stories collected in Heart Lamp were first published in the 1990s; Solvej Balle came up with the idea for On the Calculation of Volume in the 1980s; Vincenzo Latronico tried for years to write a story set at the intersection between our physical and digital lives before drafting Perfection; and A Leopard-Skin Hat is inspired by a life-long relationship between Anne Serre and her sister.  

Though three authors make the shortlist with their first English-language publication – Heart Lamp, Perfection and Small Boat – all the shortlisted authors have won literary plaudits in their home countries and beyond and have authored a number of other published works in their original language. 

Danish author Solvej Balle was awarded 2022’s prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize for On the Calculation of Volume, which was originally self-published in Denmark by Balle before becoming a word-of-mouth sensation. The first three volumes were snapped up in a six-way auction by Faber in the UK. Balle is also the author of one of the 1990s’ most acclaimed works of Danish literature, According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind (1993), which was published in more than ten countries. 

Vincent Delecroix, a philosopher, won France’s Grand Prix de Littérature de l’Académie française in 2009 for his entire body of work. Small Boat, which was written in just three weeks and is based on recordings from a real event in which 27 people died when their boat sank in the Channel in 2021, was longlisted for the 2023 Prix Goncourt and is a 2025 winner of PEN Translates, English PEN’s flagship grant programme.  

Bestselling author Hiromi Kawakami has won numerous Japanese awards, including the Akutagawa and Tanizaki. Kawakami was also shortlisted with her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014, which merged with the International Booker Prize in 2016, and for the Man Asian Prize 2013. Critically acclaimed, Under the Eye of the Big Bird has been selected as a book of 2025 by Shortlist. 

Italian writer and art critic Vincenzo Latronico’s satire about the emptiness of contemporary existence, Perfection is winning plaudits from UK arts media and has been picked as a ‘book of 2025’ in Dazed, Shortlist and AnOther magazine. Although it is Latronico’s first novel to be translated into English, it is his fourth published in Italian. He has also translated several books from English into Italian by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi.  

Banu Mushtaq, who is a major voice within progressive Kannada literature, has won India’s Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards. Heart Lamp, which features 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, won a PEN Presents award in 2024, a scheme from English PEN designed to support and showcase sample translations, giving UK publishers access to titles from underrepresented languages and regions.   

Anne Serre won the Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle in 2022 (for short stories) and is the author of 17 works of fiction. A Leopard-Skin Hat is the fourth of her books to be published in English – the other three are The Governesses, The Fool and Other Moral Tales and The Beginners. A Leopard-Skin Hat was written in six months, in the aftermath of the death of Serre’s younger sister. Serre credits the speed at which she wrote the book with it being a work ‘that had already been done’, after spending years observing her sister and reflecting on their relationship, saying that it ‘came pouring out, as if fully formed’.  

Whilst five of the translators are shortlisted for the first time, Sophie Hughes is on the list for the third time – having been shortlisted in 2020 for her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and in 2019 for her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder. Perfection is the first book that Hughes has translated from Italian, having previously worked from Spanish. She is now the translator to feature the most times on both the shortlist and the longlist.  

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland   

The author said: ‘My book is just another time-loop story: A woman, Tara Selter, is trapped in the 18th of November. In a way, I didn’t want to tell this story. I got the idea in 1987 – it probably sprang from some reflections about time after writing my first book, mixed with what I was reading at the time – but the more I thought about it, the more foolish the idea seemed to me, even more so after the Hollywood comedy Groundhog Day came out. I tried to get rid of the idea, but it kept coming back, so in the end I realised that the only way out was to write it.’ 

The translator said: ‘Solvej Balle’s work is an inspiration in itself. It’s spare and taut. There’s nothing superfluous here, nothing random. Every word is weighed, every phrase and sentence finely honed. The challenge for the translator is to produce a faithful and felicitous rendering in English of her distilled prose. As soon as I read the first book in the On the Calculation of Volume septology, I knew I had to translate it – and, happily, Solvej also wanted me to do it.’ 

The judges said: ‘A life is contained inside the melancholy of an endlessly repeating wintry day. Reading this book is an act of meditation and contemplation.’  

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda  

The author said: ‘What made me decide to write this book was the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011. That was a moment when we were confronted by the fact that humanity is no longer able to control the technologies we have created. It wasn’t until about three years later that I was able to start writing the book. Between being inspired to write a story and actually starting to write, I need time to think. This one in particular needed more of that time.’ 

The translator said: ‘It’s taken the better part of a decade for this book to come out in English. Our world has definitely changed in the meantime, but as much as I wish it could have happened differently, I also wonder whether this hasn’t turned out to be the right time for anglophone readers after all; in this story, ten years is but the turn of a page.’ 

The judges said: ‘A beguiling, radical, mind- and heart-expanding journey into humanity’s future. The visionary strangeness is utterly enchanting.’  

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi   

The author said: ‘My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates. The daily incidents reported in the media and the personal experiences I have endured have been my inspiration. The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me. I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study.’ 

The translator said: ‘For me, translation is an instinctive practice, and each book demands a completely different process. With Banu’s stories, I first read all the fiction she had published before I narrowed it down to the ones that are in Heart Lamp. I was lucky to have a free hand in choosing what stories I wanted to work with, and Banu did not interfere with the organised chaotic way I went about it.’   

The judges said: ‘Stories about encroaching modernity, as told through the lives of Muslim women in southern India. An invigorating reading experience.’  

The International Booker Prize’s global impact 

The International Booker Prize continues to build in global importance each year. The winning author and translator can expect a worldwide readership and a significant increase in profile and sales, including in the author’s home country.  

The prize has helped to drive a boom in translated fiction in the UK, with print sales in 2023 reaching a record £26m, up by 12% on the previous year, according to Nielsen BookData. This is largely down to younger readers, with almost half of translated fiction in the UK bought by under-35s. The prize’s influence also extends to other awards, with five authors recognised by the International Booker Prize going on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

The announcement of the 2024 winner, Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated from German by Michael Hofmann, was reported in over 2,500 news articles around the world.  

According to Granta Books, the UK publisher of Kairos, sales of the paperback increased by 442% in the week after winning the International Booker Prize 2024 and it outperformed all previous winners for the first month post-win. Prior to the winner announcement in May 2024, it had sold 10,000 copies across all editions; since, it has sold nearly 80,000 copies. Granta Books has sold 30,000 of these copies through UK retailers, a 17% increase in sales of the 2023 winner over the same period. Prior to its longlisting, translation rights to Kairos had been sold to 16 territories; that has now increased to 33 territories.  

In Germany, Erpenbeck and Hofmann’s home country, the original edition of Kairos sold out at many booksellers the day after its win, rising to the top 20 of the bestseller lists in all editions and reaching number 1 in paperback for the first time since publication. Its German publisher Penguin Verlag reports that before it had won the International Booker Prize in May 2024, it had sold just over 50,000 copies across all editions since its publication in 2021; in June 2024, the month after its win, it sold more than 90,000 copies. It has now sold over 230,000 copies.  

Forthcoming public events 

• Shortlisted translators at Translated By, Bristol 

New translated fiction festival, Translated By, Bristol is hosting an event with the shortlisted translators in conversation with journalist and prize administrator Fiammetta Rocco on Saturday, 17 May at 6.45pm at The Station, Bristol. Tickets can be booked here.   

• Shortlist readings, Southbank Centre 

An evening of readings from the shortlisted authors and translators will be chaired by Shahidha Bari on Sunday, 18 May 2025, in the Purcell Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London. Tickets are available here. 

• Winner event at Foyles, Charing Cross Road 

An event with the winning author and translator will take place at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, on Thursday, 22 May 2025 at 7pm. A signing after the event will take place in the International Booker Prize x Foyles Pop-up shop. Tickets can be booked here. 

• Winner event at the Hay Festival  

The prize’s annual visit to the festival occurs at 2.30pm on Saturday, 24 May, when Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood will be joined by one of this year’s judges, author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator, Anton Hur, in conversation with the winning author and translator of the International Booker Prize 2025. Tickets can be purchased here.