Today, Tuesday 8 April, the 2025 shortlist for the International Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of translated fiction, is announced.
Featuring titles that provides a ‘miraculous lens through which to view human experience’, the list introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
The shortlist
- On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
- Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson
- Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda
- Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes
- Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
- A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson
The 2025 shortlist features books translated from five original languages, (Danish, French, Japanese, Italian and Kannada), including, for the first time, Kannada, which is spoken by approximately 38 million people as a first language.
The judges
This year’s six books – five novels and one collection of short stories – have been chosen by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. Porter is joined by 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.
Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, 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 onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.
We haven’t chosen these six books because we are book experts who 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.
The winner will be announced on Tuesday 20 May, at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London, which is
celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The announcement will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ social media channels.
The prize recognises the vital work of translators with the £50,000 prize money divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).
For more information, visit the Booker Prizes website.
Get involved
If you work in a library or workplace and would like to promote the shortlist, you can download a free digital pack from our shop.
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.
Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, X and Instagram using #InternationalBooker2025.
Keep up with all the latest news on the Booker Prizes website.
Want to make sure you never miss the latest book club news? Sign up for our free monthly newsletter.
