Get to know the authors longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
We asked the authors nominated for this year’s Booker Prize about the inspirations behind their longlisted works, their favourite books, and where and when they most like to write
The Booker Prize 2025 judges and longlisted authors describe their dream book clubs
From Joni Mitchell to Diego Maradona, from a pub in London’s East End to a bookshop in Lagos, pull up a chair at these fantasy gatherings, organised by this year’s authors and judges
Roddy Doyle, Chair of the Booker Prize 2025 judges
‘Membership of my club, the Anything-But-Fiction Club, is open to anyone who wants to come along to the Windjammer, a pub near the River Liffey – an early house – at 7.30am, on the first Monday of the month. Regular attendees include Phyllis Diller, Jack Charlton, Cab Calloway, Josephine Bonaparte, Aretha Franklin and Diego Maradona – a quiet group of people. Scarlett O’Hara was a member but we threw her out when we discovered she was fictional. There are only two rules: no fiction allowed, and don’t read the book until after the meeting.’
Chris Power, Booker Prize 2025 judge
‘Because I’m Booker panel-pilled I’m going to have five people in my book club: Virginia Woolf, Borges, Roberto Bolaño, Italo Calvino and Ursula Le Guin. I want them because they’re not only incredible authors, but also great writers of non-fiction about how novels and stories work. I’ll be present but in a strictly snack-serving and eavesdropping capacity. We’ll meet at one of the mid-century modern houses I find myself salivating over in idle moments and the book we – sorry, they – will discuss is whichever one wins the Booker this year.’
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ, Booker Prize 2025 judge
‘My sister, my mum, and her four sisters. There’ll be loads of food, we’d spend about half the time talking about things unrelated to the book, but I’d leave laughing and inspired for weeks. The dream would be to read Austen, Achebe and Morrison. We’d meet at Book Nook, Lagos, a charming and intimate bookshop just a short walk from my home, perfect for evening gatherings.’
Dream book club members James Baldwin, Joan Didion and Diego Maradona
© Getty ImagesSarah Jessica Parker, Booker Prize 2025 judge
‘I want to preface this by saying that I think I have almost finished being a part of probably the best book club a reader could ever imagine. After reading this many books with this quality of people, thinking about creating another group is hard. We’ve had such an extraordinarily intense and fulfilling reader experience as a club.
‘Having said that, I am going to put together this list: Jonathan Franzen, James McBride, Wallace Stegner, Megha Majumdar and Tayari Jones. They’ve written some of my most favourite books and they all have such a gift for the hardest problems. Helping readers get inside lives that are very different from our own and giving every character such humanity, often humour, in extraordinarily difficult, challenging and painful times.
‘What book? Oh my gosh, I would leave it up to the group and I would probably defer to majority. How’s that for deflection?’
Kiley Reid, Booker Prize 2025 judge
‘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.’
Dream book club members Aubrey Plaza, Karl Marx and Joni Mitchell
© Getty ImagesClaire Adam, author of Love Forms
‘I’m not in a book club, but this question has made me think it would be nice to have a book group with my siblings and mum. We’re spread between the UK and the US, so we’d meet over Zoom. Knowing us, we’d be quite systematic: someone would draw up a spreadsheet, and we’d alternate between reading contemporary fiction, classics, science and art. Now that I’ve written this, maybe it’ll happen!’
Tash Aw, author of The South
‘Too difficult to conjure imaginary guests! I’m lucky, I have two or three close friends who are writers, and with whom I talk about books over dinner – so I have the best of both worlds, perfect dinner party guests plus informal book club.’
Natasha Brown, author of Universality
‘This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think a corner in a pub is an excellent setting for a book club. Also potentially unpopular: I think poetry makes for lively book club discussions. So, I’d pick Rachel Long’s My Darling from the Lions at the Morgan Arms in Mile End.’
Susan Choi, author of Flashlight
‘I’m not a book club person – I’m very wayward in my reading, and it’s hard enough for me to manage to read the books I assign to my students at the same time as I’ve assigned them. I’d be the person in the book club who hadn’t finished the book and was causing everyone else annoyance. But if I could sit around and talk books with anyone living or dead, I’d be sitting around with Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, if she wanted to invite me.’
Jonathan Buckley, author of One Boat
‘I prefer gatherings that are rather smaller than a club, so my ideal would be an afternoon’s stroll and conversation with Eudora Welty, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, or William Maxwell. I’d be happy to read whatever they wanted to talk about.’
Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
‘When I came to live in the United States, I fell in love with a certain stubborn, gruff woman’s voice in fiction. A suffer-no-fools kind of voice, plainspoken to the point of rudeness, but a voice that could also shift to kindness. This voice isn’t particular to the United States, of course, but I associate it with a practical, pioneer spirit, the sort you would summon to run a cattle ranch in Wyoming, but also to write a novel. So how about a book club with Eudora Welty, Isak Dinesan, Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington and Natalia Ginzburg? I would add Ismat Chughtai, to include a transgressive voice from the country of my birth. What would we read? We would have to ask these ladies because they would never take dictation from the likes of us.’
Dream book club members Aretha Franklin, Jonathan Franzen and Edith Wharton
© Getty ImagesKatie Kitamura, author of Audition
‘The members of my dream book club are all alive. Barbara Epler, Jill Schoolman and Sylvia Whitman – visionary publishers and booksellers who have, at one time or another, introduced me to writers and, more importantly, ways of writing, that I’d previously known nothing about. Maybe I would add some of my favourite translators for the same reason: Margaret Jull Costa, or Michael Hofmann. We’d meet upstairs at Shakespeare and Company, because no one creates an atmosphere conducive to the discussion of books better than Sylvia. As for what book we’d be discussing, I’d let the others decide.’
Ben Markovits, author of The Rest of Our Lives
‘I was only in a book club once, years ago, and I mostly failed to read the book under discussion, though it did give me my first taste of Philip Roth. I suppose my answer should include the writers who have meant most to me, like Roth and Henry James and Jane Austen, Byron, Philip Larkin, Alice Munro, Larry McMurtry. (The list is much longer.) But the truth is, I don’t know that I’d really like to meet them; it’s enough to read them. So I’ll choose instead some of the people I’ve always liked talking books with, my high school and college buddies, a few grown-up friends, siblings, my wife and my kids. We’d meet at the Salt Lick, a BBQ restaurant outside Austin, and discuss, I suppose, Roth and James and Austen…’
Maria Reva, author of Endling
‘I enjoy being on juries and discussing books with my peers. But book clubs? I don’t do well in those. It becomes too personal. If I love a book (like, say, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata), I want everyone to love it as much as I do. I’ll fight for it, tooth-and-nail. This is not a recipe for a cosy book club.’
Dream book club members Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin and Hilary Mantel
© Getty ImagesDavid Szalay, author of Flesh
‘We’d meet in a pub. I don’t really mind what we read – bad books are just as interesting to talk about as good ones. (Best of all would be a situation where some people think it’s a bad book and others violently disagree.) As for the people themselves, the important thing is that they shouldn’t be predictable. I should be surprised at their opinions. They should make me think.’
Benjamin Wood, author of Seascraper
‘I’d likely host it in my house so I wouldn’t need to find a babysitter. We’d read a thick literary novel that would be sure to incite strong opinions, like John Fowles’s The Magus. How many people is too many for a book club? I’d invite James Baldwin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Robert Hughes, Tobias Wolff, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Joan Didion, and Beryl Bainbridge. All week, I’d be fretting about which one of them might not show up, but I suspect any of these people would be fine enough company on their own.’
Ledia Xhoga, author of Misinterpretation
‘In my dream book club I would invite Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Aubrey Plaza – they are all inimitable and fabulous. It’s a chilly fall evening but we’ve made a roaring fire in the woods. We’re roasting chestnuts, drinking something warm and discussing The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. From what I’ve read Dorothy Parker had some strong feelings about Henry James’ prose so she will take the lead.’
