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Watch the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist films

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Lucy Boynton, Jamie Demetriou, Omari Douglas, Rosalind Eleazar, Ambika Mod and Peter Serafinowicz star in our new films showcasing the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist

To celebrate the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist, we have once again produced a series of short films featuring well-known performers reading extracts from the shortlisted books. The films’ release has become one of the most highly anticipated moments in the Booker Prizes’ calendar, with some of the UK’s leading acting and filmmaking talent taking part. Last year’s films for the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize shortlist were viewed online over 80 million times.

The new films are directed by Roxy Rezvany, an award-winning writer-director and producer working in documentary, film and TV, who is one of BAFTA’s Elevate filmmakers for 2025-26.

The stars of the latest films are: Lucy Boynton (A Cruel Love: the Ruth Ellis Story, Bohemian Rhapsody, Sing Street, Miss Potter); Jamie Demetriou (Stath Lets Flats, Fleabag, Barbie, Cruella); Omari Douglas (It’s a Sin, Black Dove, I Hate Suzie Too, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club); Rosalind Eleazar (Missing You, Slow Horses, The Personal History of David Copperfield, NW); Ambika Mod (One Day, This is Going to Hurt, White Rabbit Red Rabbit, The Stolen Girl); and Peter Serafinowicz (Amandaland, The Gentlemen, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace).  

Lucy Boynton reads from On the Calculation of Volume I

About the book and performer

About the book:

In the first part of Solvej Balle’s epic septology, Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November.

She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced.  

But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. 

As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape. 

On the Calculation of Volume I is the first book of a planned septology. Five books have been published in Danish so far, with translations underway in over 20 countries. 

About the performer:

Lucy Boynton’s first feature film role was as a young Beatrix Potter in Chris Noonan’s Miss Potter, for which she received a nomination for Best Supporting Young Actress in a Feature Film at the Young Artist Awards. She made her breakthrough as the female lead in John Carney’s Golden Globe nominated Sing Street.  

Boynton performed the lead role of Ned Benson’s The Greatest Hits, opposite Justin H. Min, and David Corenswet and as Queen Marie Antoinette in Searchlight’s biopic Chevalier, opposite Kelvin Harrison Jr. and directed by Stephen Williams. She has also starred in The Pale Blue Eye for Netflix, opposite Christian Bale and Harry Melling and alongside Rami Malek in the Golden Globe Award-winning Bohemian Rhapsody.  

Additional film credits include Locked Down, opposite Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Gareth Evans’ Apostle, Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, Danny Strong’s J.D. Salinger biopic Rebel in the Rye, Osgood Perkins’ horror film The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the BBC production of Ballet Shoes, and I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. 

In television, she starred in the Agatha Christie series, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? as well as the ITV produced, AMC + acquired The Ipcress File. Additional small screen credits include Ryan Murphy’s Golden Globe nominated Netflix series The Politician.  

Boynton was most recently seen starring in ITV mini-series A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story. 

Omari Douglas reads from Small Boat

About the book and performer

About the book:

November 2021: an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes in the Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. How and why did it happen? 

Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.  

The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?  

A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes. 

About the performer:

Omari Douglas is a BAFTA and Olivier nominated actor.   

His breakthrough role was in Russell T Davies’ Channel 4 / HBO Max smash hit series, It’s a Sin, for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other screen highlights include I Hate Suzie Too for Sky, Nolly for ITV and the Searchlight feature film, Rye Lane. He most recently starred in Joe Barton’s series for Netflix, Black Doves, alongside Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw. 

Douglas’ theatre work includes, Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew at the Bush Theatre, Ivo Van Hove’s A Little Life, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, opposite Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne, & Constellations at the Vaudeville Theatre opposite Russell Tovey, for which he received an Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor.  

Douglas is set to star in Billy Porter’s directorial debut This Bitter Earth at London’s Soho Theatre this summer.  

Rosalind Eleazar reads from Under the Eye of the Big Bird

About the book and performer

About the book:

An inventive and immersive speculative novel about a future in which humans are nearing extinction – from the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world. 

Unfolding over geological eons,Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human. 

About the performer:

Rosalind Eleazar is a Clarence Derwent Award recipient and SAG Award nominated actor. 

Her best-known for her roles in the Netflix thriller Missing You and Apple TV’s Golden Globe nominated Slow Horses, which is in its fourth season. Further screen credits include Armando Iannucci’s BIFA award winning The Personal History of David Copperfield, Class of ‘09, Deep Water for ITV, BAFTA-nominated BBC series NW and the BAFTA-winning Channel 4 series National Treasure.  

Eleazar’s theatre performances include the 2024 production of The House of Bernada Alba at the National Theatre, Ian Rickson’s Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre, The Starry Messenger at Wyndham’s Theatre, and Plaques and Tangles at the Royal Court Theatre. 

Eleazar is soon to be seen in the upcoming fifth series of Slow Horses as well as two yet-to-be-announced film projects. 

Jamie Demetriou reads from Perfection

About the book and performer

About the book:

A taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence – scathing and affecting in equal measure.

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s 24-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. 

But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp.

About the performer: 

Jamie Demetriou is a BAFTA winning actor, writer-performer and character comedian. 

He has been in a variety of feature films, including Lena Dunham’s Catherine Called Birdy, Netflix’s Eurovision with Rachel McAdams and Will Ferrell, Disney’s Cruella with Emma Stone, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain with Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy, Netflix action-comedy Back in Action with Cameron Diaz and Jamie Fox, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Further feature credits include Paddington 2, Pinocchio and Horrible Histories: the Movie.  

Demetriou’s comedy series, Stath Lets Flats has won four BAFTAS, including Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme and Best Writer: Comedy for Demetriou. His other television roles include TBS’ Miracle Workers with Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi, Hulu’s The Great with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult and in Hulu’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, created by Mindy Kaling and based on Richard Curtis’s hit 90s film, Steve Coogan’s This Time with Alan Partridge for BBC One, the BAFTA-winning Sally 4Ever, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, for the BBC. 

Demetriou has voiced characters in various film features and TV series. He played Moriarty, opposite Johnny Depp’s Sherlock, in Paramount’s animation feature film Sherlock Gnomes and can currently be heard as Dr. Phillips in Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again. 

Demetriou will next be seen in The Roses opposite Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, scheduled for release this summer.   

Ambika Mod reads from Heart Lamp

About the book and performer

About the book:

In 12 stories, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India

Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.  

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards.
 

About the performer:

Ambika Mod began her career as a stand-up, sketch, and improv comedian aged 19, writing and performing her own material around the country and at several Edinburgh Fringe Festivals.

Her breakout role came in 2022 in the widely acclaimed BBC One series This Is Going to Hurt, opposite Ben Whishaw, for which she won the Royal Television Society Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Broadcast Press Guild Award for Best Actress. In 2024, Mod starred as Emma Morley in the Netflix series One Day, based on David Nicholls’ best-selling novel.  For her performance Mod was nominated for a Gotham Award for Outstanding Performance in a Limited Series and a RTA Leading Actor – Female.  

Her theatre credits include White Rabbit Red Rabbit at London’s Soho Place theatre, which she participated in last year. Later this year she will star in the world premiere of Porn Play, at the London’s Royal Court theatre, written by Sophia Chetin Leuner and directed by Josie Rourke.   

Mod has received a number of accolades, including being named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Europe, on Time NEXT100 and Sunday Times Young Power lists and on Elle’s 40 for 40 Women in film and TV list, highlighting women poised to shape the coming decades in the industry.    

Other work this year includes the film Sacrifice, directed by Romain Gavras, which Mod stars in alongside Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Vincent Cassel, and Salma Hayek.  

Peter Serafinowicz reads from A Leopard-Skin Hat

About the book and performer

About the book:

The story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders.

Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance’, A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet.  

A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel.

Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre’s signature style. 

About the performer:

Peter Serafinowicz is an actor, comedian, director and screenwriter.  

Serafinowicz has starred in a number of feature films, including in The School for Good and Evil on Netflix, Judd Apatow’s film, The Bubble, also for Netflix, and dramatic thriller Dead Hot on Tubi.  

Additional film credits include Brad Silberling’s An Ordinary Man alongside Ben Kingsley, Spy opposite Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham, Couples Retreat, Guardians of the Galaxy, Shaun of the Dead, John Wick: Chapter II, and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, in which he provided the voice for Darth Maul, and a voiceover role in the animated feature sequel Sing 2. He can most recently be seen in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen for Netflix and will feature in the upcoming film How to Train Your Dragon. 

Serafinowicz’ television work includes the titular role in the Amazon comedy series The Tick and in White House Plummers for HBO with Woody Harrelson. He can currently be seen in BBC’s Amandaland.   

Read more about the International Booker Prize shortlist