The 2025 shortlist for the Booker Prize—the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction—has been announced.
‘Brilliantly human’ shortlist showcases authors who have spent decades honing their craft.
Featuring both classical storytelling and novels that push the boundaries of narrative form, the shortlist is preoccupied with the ties that bind families together. The characters navigate familiar domestic situations: the power dynamic shifts between parents and their children, marriages come adrift, families reckon with the weight of their own history, and individuals perform the roles others expect them to play. Together, the shortlisted books transport readers from Hungary to Japan, from Italy to the US, from India to England, and feature often rootless characters far from the places they once called home. The books take place over vastly differing time spans: some over the course of just a few days or weeks; others over several decades.
The shortlist
- Flashlight by Susan Choi
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
- Audition by Katie Kitamura
- The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits
- The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
- Flesh by David Szalay
The judges
The shortlist of six books has been selected by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. Doyle, who is the first Booker Prize winner to chair a Booker judging panel, is joined by Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid.
Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, says:
Re-reading all 13 books on the longlist was a huge pleasure; I was feeling the excitement, the joy I’ve felt since I started reading books with no pictures in them 60 years ago. As judges, we could re-examine, savour and admire them without having to worry about the boxes of unread novels that were waiting to trip us every time we got up to fill the kettle. Some books seemed to grow. Others remained excellent, exactly as we’d left them.
Pleasure stopped about halfway through the meeting to decide the shortlist. We continued to laugh, to listen to one another, to shuffle the remaining books, seeing similarities and differences, strengths and uniqueness. But in whittling the 13 down to six, there was sadness, even guilt at losing books we loved. But also satisfaction and gratitude: we had chosen six great novels.
The six have, I think, two big things in common. Their authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written. And all of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people. In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human.
Forthcoming events and the winner announcement
The shortlisted authors will be taking part in public events at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature on 11 October and at the Southbank Centre on 9 November. Details of the first public event with the winner in Newcastle in partnership with New Writing North will be announced on Tuesday, 23 September. Further information on all Booker Prize events can be found here.
The Booker Prize 2025 ceremony will take place at Old Billingsgate on Monday, 10 November at 6pm and will be broadcast in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts programme Front Row from 9.30-10pm. The ceremony will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ social channels. The winner will receive £50,000, a trophy named Iris (after 1978 winner Iris Murdoch) and can expect their career to be transformed.
For more information, visit the Booker Prizes website.
Further reading:
Shortlist reading guides
Everything you need to know about the shortlist
Get to know the shortlisted authors
What our judges said about the shortlist
Get to know the Booker Prize 2025 judges
Get involved
We have a competition open until 2 October for two lucky groups each to win a set of the six shortlisted titles. Enter now.
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What do you think of the 2025 shortlisted titles? Which have you read and what will be added to your TBR pile? Add your comments below, or click any title above to leave a review.
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