Jonathan Buckley interview: ‘At no point did I ever envisage becoming a novelist’
The author of One Boat, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, talks about how writing became a daily necessity and about the books he reads again and again
Jonathan Buckley
Jonathan Buckley is a British writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton, UK
In 2015, he won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Briar Road’, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. In 2022, his novel Tell was the joint winner of the Novel Prize – a global, biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English – and was shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. He was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 for his 13th novel, One Boat.
Before becoming a novelist, he was an editorial director at Rough Guides and wrote several guidebooks for visitors to Italy.
Buckley creates a novel of quiet brilliance and sly humour, packed with mystery and indeterminacy
— The Booker Prize 2025 judges on One Boat
All nominated books
Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat grapples with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility
