The six books on the shortlist have been chosen by the 2025 judging panel: bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter; prize-winning poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton. The selection celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025, as judged by the 2025 panel. The judges have whittled down their shortlist from a longlist of 13, selected from 154 books submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was launched in its current format in 2016. 

Max Porter says: 

‘This shortlist is the result of a life-enhancing conversation between myself and my fellow judges. Reading 154 books in six months made us feel like high-speed Question Machines hurtling through space. Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.     

‘This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows into a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.   

‘We haven’t chosen these six books because we are book experts that think people need to be told what to read. We have chosen them because we need them, we found them, and we love them. We need literature that shocks, delights and baffles and reveals how weird many of us feel about the way we are living now. Ultimately, these books widen the view. They enhance the quality of conversation we are all having. They don’t shut down debate, they generate it. They don’t have all the answers, but they ask extraordinary questions.’   

Here’s what the judges had to say about the six individual books on the shortlist. 

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up? 

A life contained inside the melancholy of a wintry day – a day which is somehow also the antidote to modernity’s loneliness, isolation, and apathy. 

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before? 

Reading this book is an act of meditation and contemplation; the reader reads it, but also inhabits it, and will have an insightful time.   

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love? 

Readers will take a certain resonance from the work that brings them calm and centred thought in our otherwise hectic and troubling world. 

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why? 

The narrator’s journey will open the reader up to the many shades of thinking and being in their own everyday lives. 

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world? 

We live in a world of endless distractions, crises and despair, and while this book does not present a solution, it may present a pathway to one by bringing us back into a communion with ourselves. 

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

It’s really the cumulative mood of the work that the reader is left with more than a moment; a mood that permeates the reader’s mind until we, too, are a part of this ever-repeating day. 

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

A brilliantly unflinching use of literature to ask the most uncomfortable but urgent question of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

This book doesn’t just set up a complex fictional situation to illuminate the greatest human crisis of our time, it puts us inside it. It shows us how it is already inside us, in our language, our feelings, our relationships to news, politics and each other.  

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

It has the power to fundamentally change the way we see the world. Readers love being changed! That’s why we read.  

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

The genius of this book is the way we are revolted by the protagonist, then feel for her, then fear we can no longer deny the many ways we have become her.  

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

This book unapologetically confronts the greatest moral question of our time: the collective responsibility of those in a place of safety to those who seek it. It is the literary antidote to tabloid ignorance, hatred and xenophobia.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

The central section of the book, which describes a (real-life) tragedy in the Channel, is one of the most devastating and affecting sections of any book.  

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda  

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

A beguiling, radical, mind- and heart-expanding journey into humanity’s future.  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

This is a book of effervescent newness; new ways of seeing human beings, new languages of feeling, described by new species whose bodies and brains do new things.  

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

The visionary strangeness is utterly enchanting, it’s like spending time in a parallel universe, but navigating with a map made of contemporary feelings.  

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

There’s a remarkable couple, Jakob and Ian, who we begin to realise are many thousands of years old, and can move between consciousnesses and leap between species, but are delightfully ordinary, even normal, just like us. 

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

It’s an urgent enquiry into the implications of AI, the promise of a genetically adapted or machine-led future for the human project, but done in a gorgeous, ambient, non-doctrinaire sci-fi style.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

There is a description of a deep-future mourning ritual in which a single bone is given back to the life partner of the deceased so that they might finally know what genetic material their loved one was created from, and it is profoundly beautiful.  

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

A pitch-perfect and profound account of the existential malaise of millennial life.  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

This book really infects you, but without any of the usual techniques of a novel. It eschews traditional storytelling techniques in place of an almost clinical or sociological deep-dive into the trappings of contemporary life.   

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

Perfection alters the reader, traps them, revolts them, intrigues them, and ultimately moves them to ask serious questions about themselves.  

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

The internet is the stand-out character in this book. How has it got its teeth into us? How are we all performing versions of ourselves online, and what does that mean for the embodied self, in the so-called real world? 

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

It’s a lean and agonisingly well-observed catalogue of contemporary concerns, from late capitalist enslavement to modern love, from soft furnishings on Instagram to the metaphysics of Western guilt.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

There is an unforgettable moment when the young couple pack up their apartment and hide all evidence of their real lives, to fake the space into being rentable for others like them to come and briefly live a not-real life. 

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up? 

Stories on the chaos of encroaching modernity and contemporary life, as told through the lives of Muslim women in southern India. 

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before? 

The tight-gauged, texture of the intricate translation creates a most invigorating reading experience, rare nowadays in English-language fiction. 

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love? 

The many shades of emotions on display, shifting, and catharsisising on the page, in a beautifully rendered, iconoclastic translation. 

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why? 

Without wanting to give anything away, there is one story about a funeral shroud which speaks to the way we all carry some guilt about the people we love. People will really be moved by this one. 

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world? 

Societal change affects women the most, with their constantly shifting roles and expectations, and women everywhere will likely see themselves in the struggle and triumph of the women in these stories. 

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

When a mother tries to get her son circumcised a second time so she can get more food, the desperation and the absurdity of the moment really stuck with us, thanks to the economical, accurate language.  
 

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

In short chapters, the Narrator attempts to put into words the teeming life and tragic death of his childhood friend, Fanny. It’s a masterful lesson in how we remember and retell the lives of those bound up with our own, how we sieve and distil memories and fictions of the mind into true feelings.  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

There have been some great novels about friendship, but the duty of care with which one remembers and writes a life really struck us and stayed with us. The book is both a celebration of life and an elegy — holding the fragility of life and death in its hands with the utmost care. With incredible insight, invention and dignity it sensitively captures the open wound with which the death of a loved one leaves us.  

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

We loved how it experimented with – and expanded – the possibilities of the novel form. Where do we draw the lines between life and fiction? How can we reinvent the contemporary novel form through our reading of it? This novel invites readers to work and to play — what’s not to love about that?   

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

Without giving too much away, the book does not feature your classic, typical narrator. We’ll leave you with this to ponder on: ‘A Narrator is just like everyone else, the only difference being that he tells stories; he has none of the extraordinary powers people ascribe to him …’  

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

Written in the aftermath of the death of Serre’s sister, this novel attempts to cup the elusive, slippery nature of grief. Although it tackles personal loss and mental illness, there’s a sense in which, with the reader’s engagement, the grief becomes ours. It becomes communal and shared. As we grieve the loss of our collective humanity, this book offers hope and helps us feel less alone in the world.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

‘When Fanny was present, the sky was the sky, the earth earth; with one fell blow, her bracing brutality would separate out the elements, restoring objects and people to their rightful places and adjusting the rules of perspective. Perhaps he’ll just have to keep his friend inside him …’ 

Ah! What a pleasure and privilege it is to have someone adjust our perspective, to be able to hold someone inside ourselves. Which of us can truly say that another human being has moved and changed us so deeply and fully?