Kiley Reid, one of the Booker Prize 2025 judges, tells us about the stories that sparked her imagination as a child, and why she likes to make books compete against one another
Kiley Reid
Booker Prize 2025 judge
- Prizes judged
Kiley Reid is a New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author
She was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 for her first novel, Such a Fun Age. It was a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Her second novel, Come and Get It, was also a New York Times bestseller, a Good Morning America Book Club pick, and named a best book of 2024 by the New Yorker, NPR, ELLE, and New York Magazine’s Vulture.
Reid is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, the Guardian, and others. She has taught graduate-level seminars and workshops at Temple University and the University of Michigan.
She is a judge for the Booker Prize 2025.
Quality fiction intimately portrays the darkest depths of human behavior. I love seeing the inside of other peoples’ houses. Fiction is the most enticing way to do so
Kiley Reid, Booker Prize 2025 judge, on the power of fiction
All nominated books
Kiley Reid explores the awkwardness of transactional relationships and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason
Features
- Book recommendations
Booker Prize authors on the childhood books that made them fall in love with fiction
- Interview
Kiley Reid Q&A
- Book recommendations