Booker Prize Longlist 2025

The Booker Prize Longlist 2025 has just been announced. The longlist of 13 books – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – has been chosen by the 2025 judging panel and features novels from nine different nationalities in a truly global list.

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Booker Prize Longlist 2025

Five of the 13-strong longlist for the Booker Prize’s £50,000 award, known as the Booker Dozen, are British writers but there is an international feel to this years list with nine nationalities represented.

This year’s longlist “are all alive with great characters and narrative surprises”, said Roddy Doyle. “All, somehow, examine identity, individual or national, and all, I think, are gripping and excellent.”

Nine of this year’s 13 authors appear longlist for the first time and two with their debut novels including the stunning Endlings by Maria Reva. Malaysian author Tash Aw is longlisted for a third time, and also returning are previously shortlisted Andrew Miller and David Szalay.

Kiran Desai makes the longlist with her first book since she won the 2006 prize with The Inheritance of Loss. Scheduled to be published in September 2025, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny took almost 20 years to write. Kiran’s mother, Anita Desai, has previously been shortlisted for the Booker three times.

Former US professional basketball player Ben Markovits, and seriously underrated author, has been longlisted for his 12th novel. The Rest of Our Lives tells the story of a man who decides to go on a road trip after dropping his daughter off at college.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, praised a longlist that championed global perspectives.

“The stories are set all over the world, and their authors, all of them writing in English, come from many different places too. There was an Indian writer, a Malaysian, a Trinidadian, an Albanian-American, a Hungarian-Briton and a Canadian-Ukrainian … It’s the highest number of different nationalities we’ve seen on a Booker Prize longlist for a decade – yet British writers are strongly represented too.

“While [the list] includes historical epics, brilliant formal experiments and a compact satire, many of the novels speak to the reader in an unadorned, confiding voice. This intimate effect, so difficult to achieve, was immediately appreciated by the judges, who are as alive to unshowy skills as they are to more virtuosic ones.”

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 23 September. The winner of the Booker Prize 2025 will be announced on 10 November. The winning author will receive £50,000.

The 2025 judging panel is chaired by Irish Novelist and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. the rest of the panel features; actor Sarah Jessica Parker; literary critic Chris Power; Booker Prize-longlisted authors Kiley Reid and novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.

The judges are looking for 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. 