Booker Prize 2024 and International Booker Prize 2025 judges.

How our prize judges are chosen: ‘It’s the group dynamic that matters’

Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, reveals the qualities we are looking for when selecting ‘a jury of creative peers’

Written by Gaby Wood

Published July 17, 2024

Last week, we revealed the judges for the International Booker Prize 2025 – a panel chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter and which includes Caleb Femi, Sana Goyal, Anton Hur and Beth Orton. The announcement was welcomed with such warmth and has sparked such interesting conversations about how the judges are chosen and the qualities we’re looking for that we felt it was time to explain how the process works.

First of all, it’s important to know that suggestions for judges come from lots of different places – our own team, who have a range of interests; our advisory committee; past judges, who know what’s involved; friends in the book world and beyond it. We pay attention to who’s reading and writing and thinking about words in the cultural world at large. We try to avoid a situation in which judges are chosen on the whim of, say, the Chief Executive… You never know what you’re not seeing until someone else points it out.

Fundamentally, what we’re looking for is a jury of creative peers: people who exercise their imaginations on a regular basis, or are used to working alongside others who do. It’s crucial that they should be well-disposed towards the writers whose books are submitted, and receptive to the risks good writers are taking. The judges need to know what it feels like to take that leap, as well as remembering that they’re reading on behalf of the general public.

Early Booker Prize panels often included novelists. Saul Bellow was a judge, and so were John Fowles, Philip Larkin, Angela Carter, Edna O’Brien, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge, P.D. James and Hilary Mantel.

In the middle years there was a preponderance of politicians: Kenneth Baker, Michael Portillo, Douglas Hurd, to name a few. I was a judge in 2011, as part of a panel led by the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington. (It was a much-maligned but very happy group.)

It’s not unreasonable to appoint a politician as chair: their job, after all, is to arrive at consensus. But I hesitate over the implication that there is a creative class, and that somewhere higher up in the establishment pecking order, there’s another class that’s fit to judge them.

So in my time at the Booker (from 2016), I’ve sought to return to the idea of peers. With one proviso: that the notion of what constitutes a Booker novelist’s peer be expanded.

As a result, we’ve had artists and graphic novelists on the panels for the first time. We’ve had musicians and composers. We’ve just appointed a filmmaker. We’ve continued to have past Booker novelists and critics of course, but we’ve also had a speculative fiction writer, and we’ve had a judge on the English Language prize who had been shortlisted for the International Prize and writes in French. It’s always interesting to hear actors talk about their reading, because they grapple with words in a different way from non-performers. Poets tend to read at the level of the sentence and historians see the sweep. When we’ve had crime writers – Val McDermid and Lee Child were both superb judges – they’ve been in conversation with philosophers and classicists.

In other words – and this is perhaps the most important factor – it’s the group dynamic that matters, not just the individuals. You want some who respond to the heart in a book and others who are drawn to the head in it. They all need to be committed listeners. It’s often assumed that newspaper columnists or TV pundits would make natural prize judges, and they sometimes do. But already knowing what you think is not necessarily an asset in this context. This is a panel discussion that lasts the best part of a year, during which judges live their lives and come together repeatedly, regardless of what’s going on outside the room. When they meet once a month they discuss 20 or 30 books, and in each case, every judge will have read a slightly different book from the one the other four have read. Their task as readers is to describe the books and see if their fellow judges recognise their own experience in the description. They often change each other’s minds. Gradually the best books become richer, through the discussion.

Lee Child, bestselling author and 2020 Booker Prize judge

It’s important to create a trusting environment in which the judges can do this. To state the obvious and there is perhaps an emotional distinction to be made here between fiction and non-fiction – reading novels is a very personal experience, and judges often share something of themselves in the process of evoking that. One person’s irritant may be another’s consolation; hearing this matters because those experiences are likely to be replicated in the world at large – among the readers to whom they are recommending these books, or not. Once the judges have earned each other’s trust, many stay in touch. One panel has even continued as a book group.

A judging panel needs to face in two directions: inwards, towards their colleagues in the judging room, and outwards, to the world. They must be equipped to make the best possible set of collective decisions, and they must also signal to the general public that they can credibly read on their behalf. Who are these people? Why should I trust them to make decisions for me? These are questions readers are entitled to ask. Equally, authors might think: who is this person to cast judgment on my work? The judges must have enough expertise and a wide enough span of tastes that every good book stands a chance of finding its ideal reader on the panel. And they must also have enough variety in their backgrounds that readers feel, broadly speaking, represented.

Eventually, they must agree: this final piece of the puzzle is based not on intellect or experience but on human qualities that include generosity of spirit and openness of mind.

Attempting or anticipating these combinations can be a bit of a high-wire act. The 2025 International Prize panel is a good example of creative peers coming together. It’s led by Max Porter, a writer of dazzlingly varied skill, who has also edited two Booker-winning novels. That creates a snowball effect: talented people want to work with him. Hence Caleb Femi, poet, photographer and filmmaker; Anton Hur, Booker-shortlisted translator; Beth Orton, singer-songwriter; and Sana Goyal, writer and publisher of Wasafiri magazine.

I’m also happy to report that this year’s Booker Prize judges – with whom I’ve now spent seven months – are a genuine dream team. We’re looking forward to sharing their longlist with you very soon.