The longlist for the Booker Prize 2025
Mohan Gulrajani
The longlist for the Booker Prize 2025 has been announced, and features a previous winner plus two debut novelists
The longlist 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 the 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.
This year’s selection, which was chosen from 153 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
For the first time, the shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event, to be held at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on Tuesday, 23 September 2025. The six shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The announcement of the winning book will take place on Monday, 10 November 2025 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The announcement will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels. The winner receives £50,000.
Longlist
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
The ‘Booker Dozen’ features five British authors, while also encapsulating a vast range of global experiences. The 13 novels transport readers to a farm in southern Malaysia, a Hungarian housing estate and a small coastal town in Greece. They shine a light on the lives of Koreans in postcolonial Japan, a homesick Indian in snowy Vermont, a Kosovar torture survivor living in New York, a shrimp fisherman in the north of England, a mother’s search for a child given up for adoption in Venezuela and even endangered snails in contemporary Ukraine. They reimagine the great American road trip as a slow-burning mid-life crisis and take us into the heart of the UK’s coldest winter.
The judges’ selection features:
- Authors representing nine nationalities across four continents, with UK authors securing the highest number of nominations
- Kiran Desai, who is nominated 19 years after her previous book won the Booker Prize
- Tash Aw, longlisted for a third time, who could become the first Malaysian winner
- Past short listees Andrew Miller and David Szalay
- Two debut novelists among nine authors who appear on the Booker Prize longlist for the first time
- The first novel from an opera librettist and the 12th from a former professional basketball player
- A book that first garnered acclaim as a short story, and one that is the first in a proposed quartet
- Three titles from independent publisher Faber and a first Booker longlisting for Fitzcarraldo Editions, to add to its 16 International Booker Prize nominations
- Novels that are ‘alive with great characters and narrative surprises’ which ‘examine the past and poke at our shaky present’, according to Roddy Doyle, Chair of the 2025 judges
© Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2025
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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