International Booker Prize 2025: what the shortlistees said about their books

Vincent Delecroix, author of Small Boat

‘My purpose was neither to formulate a moral judgement nor to just express loud and easy indignation. On the contrary, it was to suspend all moral judgement, and, by writing an imaginary character, to simply try to penetrate a consciousness that could belong to anyone. What does it mean to be a spectator of the wreckage, as we all are? How can anyone slip from a common and ordinary behaviour to a calm inhuman position? These were the questions I wanted to raise, faced with a brutal and dreadful situation. I was sure that readers would experience a deep discomfort, maybe even a moral shock.’ 

Helen Stevenson, translator of Small Boat

‘We’re all so accustomed to reading news pieces about the migrant crossings, we have a way of reading them without really reading. Here was a fictional text that forced the reader to slow down. It raises painful questions about responsibility, about looking away. I remembered reading the news coverage, and seeing a documentary called The Crossing, in which a survivor of the sinking talked about that night – I rewatched it while I was translating. I was really struck by a phrase I read in This Tilting World by Colette Fellous – that the word translate literally means to ferry across.’ 

Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection 

‘I had tried for years to find a way to tell a story set at the intersection between our physical and our digital lives – how the two shape each other and our inner horizon. But it never worked – there is something about the way time spent online vanishes that seemed to resist any linear plot. When I finished, at first, I was a bit dispirited. It is a short novel without real characters, without dialogue, with no explicit plot and almost completely made of descriptions. When I sent the draft to my agent, I apologised profusely. I still read that email from time to time and have a laugh.’ 

Sophie Hughes, translator of Perfection 

‘I’m always slow, but this short book took me a particularly long time to finish, in part because I had a baby, but also, I think, because it is my first published translation from Italian, so I was particularly dithering and tinkering, in a way that I no longer am with Spanish. I liked working with Vincenzo because he cares about the smallest details, knowing from experience that over the length of an entire novel, making these seemingly inconsequential changes is actually the most important part of the process of reconstructing style in another language. Biggest challenge? I’ve never been to Berlin. But Douglas Adams never went to space.’

Anne Serre, author of A Leopard-Skin Hat

‘I wrote the book after the suicide of my younger sister, at the age of 43, with whom I had an intense bond. I wanted to create a memorial to her, one that was as beautiful as possible. My sister died in March, and I see from my notebooks that I finished the book in September. That was because the work had already been done, in a way. All through the preceding years, I had been observing her, talking with her, thinking about her misfortune, and wondering to what extent I was partly responsible for it. The book came pouring out, as if fully formed.’ 

Mark Hutchinson, translator of A Leopard-Skin Hat 

‘Anne is a close friend of mine, so I read all of her books as they first appear, in French. When I’m translating, I do a quick mot-à-mot of the whole thing, and then work it up from there – the whole book each time, over and over, until I have an accurate English facsimile of the French. Once everything is in place, I do what I call the varnishing – that is, I go back over it as many times as is necessary, sentence by sentence, listening to it as a piece of English, buffing and polishing and gathering up any slack.’