International Booker Prize 2025
This past week saw the release of the International Booker Prize 2025 Longlist. Notable this year was that all the nominations were for authors making their first appearance on a Booker Prize List.
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International Booker Prize 2025
The International Booker Prize seeks to honor the best novels and short story collections in translation published in the UK and/or Ireland every year. This year’s longlist was selected from books published between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025.
For 2025 the judging panel is chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. The other judges are: prize-winning poet Caleb Femi; writer Sana Goyal; author and translator Anton Hur; and singer-songwriter Beth Orton.
Author and judging chair Max Porter said that he hopes the “unconventional” longlist will “exhilarate” readers. “These books bring us into the agony of family, workplace or nation-state politics, the near-spiritual secrecy of friendship, the inner architecture of erotic feeling, the banality of capitalism and the agitations of faith,”.
This longlist’s authors and translators represent 15 nationalities on five continents, with Romanian and Surinamese-Dutch writers and an Iraqi translator featured for the first time. These are books translated from 10 languages. They include Romanian, and Canarese which is spoken by some 38 million people, primarily in the southwestern Indian state Karnataka.
It’s a banner year for independent publishers. 12 of the 13 titles on the list were from independent publishers.
Notables on the longlist include Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa. Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge .
A defiant, darkly funny debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life
On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer was first published in Dutch 43 years ago, and is now translated into English by Lucy Scott.
This is the longest period between an original-language publication and International Booker prize longlisting. It is also first nomination from Suriname.
Sinan Antoon is the first Iraqi translator to be nominated, for his translation of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem.
Set in modern-day Jaffa, The Book of Disappearance presents a hauntingly surreal scenario where all Palestinian inhabitants suddenly vanish overnight. Through alternating perspectives, the novel explores how Israelis react to the disappearance and how the Palestinian protagonist’s diary offers a glimpse into his people’s historical struggles and identity. Azem masterfully blends magical realism with socio-political commentary, making it a profound and thought-provoking read.
The Longlist
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson
On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter
There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland
The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon
The International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, 8 April. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, 20 May. The winning author and translator will split a prize of £50,000. 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).
Previous winners of the prize include Ismael Kadare, Han Kang and Olga Tokarczuk. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann won the 2024 prize.
If you enjoyed our review of the International Booker Prize 2025 longlist, check out last year’s International Booker Prize
