Kiley Reid interview: ‘I love stories that don’t feel rushed and refuse to hold your hand’
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 is a New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author. Read her full bio.
You will read over a hundred books in seven months as a Booker Prize judge. How are you approaching this unique challenge, and what are your tips for people who want to find more time for reading but may struggle to fit it around their busy schedules?
Making time to read is like making time for anything else – you have to combine habits or give up something else. Combining habits looks like reading while on a treadmill. But giving up something is not necessarily a loss. For seven months now, I haven’t dipped into my own writing as it’s just not possible with the volume of submissions. But reading is such an essential part of writing and I’m still feeding my process despite not sitting down to write.
I also suggest reading more than one book at a time. I like to make books compete against one another. My feelings for them become clear very quickly this way.
Reading is a mostly solitary experience, but judging is a shared one. How does discussing a book with other people change the reading experience?
The reading experience itself remains the same, but it’s incredible how the reads of others can change your mind. There’s a fun nervousness and anticipation to see if others felt similarly about the work. And there’s a really lovely pressure to properly articulate why you may have fallen in love. Discussing books with other people is a great reminder to writers (and humans!) that your work always meets others on their own terms.
Who, living or dead, would be in your dream book club and why? What would you read and where would you meet?
My answer for this question was once Karl Marx, James Baldwin and Cat Marnell, but after all of this reading I want absolutely no pressure and I’d love a small book club of people I know well. I’d pick my long time friends Kelsey and Isabel and we’d read Nuclear War: A Scenario at a cabin in the mountains.
Booker Prize 2025 judge Kiley Reid at a judging meeting at Fortnum & Mason in London
© Neo Gilder for the Booker Prize FoundationDiscussing books with other people is a great reminder to writers (and humans!) that your work always meets others on their own terms
What book made you fall in love with reading as a child? How and why did it capture your imagination?
There’s a children’s book called The Monster At the End of This Book and it terrified me in a way that made me come online. I knew what was coming and I was still afraid. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle also evoked this feeling. I remember seeing the one illustration in the book – the round robin, a sign for mutiny – and it left me completely cold in all the best ways. The search for this literary dread stays with me even now.
What’s your all-time favourite Booker-nominated book and what’s so special about it? Who would you recommend it to?
My favourite Booker-nominated book is This Other Eden by Paul Harding. It takes place on an island that once inhabited a mixed-race fishing community in 1912. I love novels that you can just take a bath in; stories that don’t feel rushed and refuse to hold your hand. It reads like music and the characters are just entirely themselves. It also has that dread I was just talking about, even in the moments of joy. I’d recommend it to anyone really, but particularly postpartum parents who are nursing. There’s something about the books you read while nursing your child in the middle of the night…they keep up with you differently. This is one you’ll want to stay.
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
