The International Booker Prize 2025

(Chair) Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize, among others, as well as being shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. Lanny was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was a Sunday Times bestseller and Shy was an instant number one bestseller. Porter has written the adapted screenplay of Shy, to be filmed by Netflix in 2024. He has also written The Death of Francis Bacon, The Hill, the short film All of this Unreal Time and the pamphlet It’s Going to Be a Bright New Day. His original drama series The Photographer is playing on BBC Radio 4 now. His work has been translated into 33 languages. 

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a frequent collaborator with, and mentor to, musicians, artists, theatre makers and arts and literacy charities. He was previously Editorial Director at Granta Books, where he published The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which won the Booker Prize 2013, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang, winner of the International Booker Prize 2016.

Caleb Femi is a writer, director and photographer, and was featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. Femi’s award-winning debut poetry collection, Poor, was published in 2020 by Penguin Press, and won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2021. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the Jhalak Prize, was selected as a Book of the Year by the New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer and BBC and was added to AQA’s English Literature GCSE syllabus in the UK in 2022.  

He has directed TV episodes for HBO, the BBC and Netflix, as well as commercials, high-fashion films and runway shows for brands such as Louis Vuitton, TikTok, Bottega Veneta, Dior, Mulberry and NCS. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Young People’s Laureate for London, working with young people on a city, national and global level. His next work, The Wickedest, will be published by Fourth Estate in September 2024.

Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of the British literary magazine Wasafiri, which celebrates its 40^th anniversary in 2024. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. 

Anton Hur’s translation from Korean of Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was also longlisted for the International Booker in 2022, making him the third translator in history to be double-longlisted in the same year. His co-translation of Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and his translations of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets and Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence were consecutively longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

As a novelist in his own right, Hur is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). He was born in Stockholm and currently lives in Seoul. He studied law and psychology at Korea University and specialized in Victorian poetry at the Seoul National University Graduate School English programme. He is the recipient of a PEN Translates grant and a PEN/Heim grant. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.

Beth Orton is a BRIT Award-winning, multiple Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter. She has released seven acclaimed solo albums over the past 27 years, showcasing her lyrical power as a songwriter across a career in which music has always been a vehicle for the exploration of words. 

In 2022 Orton released her first entirely self-produced album, Weather Alive, on Partisan Records. It was reviewed by Pitchfork as ‘the best work of her career’ and appeared on many year-end best lists, including The New York Times.

Orton has collaborated with artists such as The Chemical Brothers, Andrew Weatherall, Bert Jansch and Nick Cave. Her touring has taken her across the world, headlining performances at the Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Glastonbury Festival, Carnegie Hall and beyond.

The Booker Prizes exist to reward the finest in fiction. The symmetrical relationship between the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize ensures that the Booker honours fiction on a global basis: world-class fiction is highlighted by the prizes for English-speaking readers, whether that work was originally written in English (the Booker Prize) or translated into English (the International Booker Prize).

The International Booker Prize began life in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize. It was initially a biennial prize for a body of work, and there was no stipulation that the work should be written in a language other than English. Early winners of the Man Booker International Prize therefore include Alice Munro, Lydia Davis and Philip Roth, as well as Ismail Kadare and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. 

In 2015, after the rules of the original Booker Prize expanded to allow writers of any nationality to enter – as long as their books were written in English and published in the UK – the International Prize evolved to become the mirror image of the English-language prize. Unlike the original Booker Prize, collections of short stories are eligible for the International Booker Prize.

Since 2016, the International Booker has been awarded annually for a single book, written in another language and translated into English. The first winner of the prize in its new format was Han Kang for her novel The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith. Han Kang is one of five authors recognised by the International Booker Prize who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Man Group continued to sponsor both prizes until 2019, when Crankstart became the funder, and the prize names reverted to the familiar ‘Booker’ name alone.

This prize aims to encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world, and has had a significant impact on those statistics in the UK and beyond. According to Granta Books, the UK publisher of Kairos, winner of the International Booker in 2024, sales of the paperback increased by 442% in the week after winning the prize.