The International Booker Prize 2025

Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, adds:

‘It has been fantastic to experience the buzz around this year’s International Booker Prize. We have our excellent panel of judges to thank for this, who have taken an enormous amount of care in their selection of books they want to recommend to readers. This veritable smorgasbord of a shortlist is for all those who look to books for emotional and intellectual sustenance. Though the books featured are slim, they will take up space in readers’ minds long after they’ve finished.

‘With all six books on the list published by independents for the first time, I’d like to thank the publishers for their ongoing commitment to bringing so many original and exciting international writers and translators to English language readers. Their passion, along with that of the many booksellers and librarians championing global writing, has no doubt helped to fuel a very welcome boom in translated fiction in the UK and Ireland.’

(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.

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. 

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.