The 2025 Booker Prize longlist has been announced by this year’s judging panel, chaired by author and 1993 Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle.
The other judges for this year’s Prize are novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and bestselling author Kiley Reid.
The longlist was chosen from 153 submissions and comprises what the judges believe to be 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.
The Booker Prize 2025 longlist:
- Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber)
- The South by Tash Aw (4th Estate)
- Universality by Natasha Brown (Faber)
- One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape)
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
- Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press)
- The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber)
- The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)
- Endling by Maria Reva (Virago/Little, Brown)
- Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)
- Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)
- Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals)
This year’s longlist features seven women and six men from nine countries: Albania, Canada, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, the UK and USA.
Two debut novels have made the list: Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation and Maria Reva’s Endling.
The heftiest book on the list is Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, coming in at more than 650 pages; the shortest, at 156 pages, is Universality by Natasha Brown. Four books on this year’s list are under 200 pages long.
As per the Booker Prizes website:
‘The nominated novels encapsulate a vast range of international experiences. Arguably more than any other year in the prize’s history, this year’s longlist boasts a truly global outlook.
‘The longlisted books 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 whose child was 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.
‘There’s a novel that began life as a short story in the New Yorker, one that was almost 20 years in the making and another that’s the first book in a proposed quartet. There are books that explore modern masculinity in its many forms, the intense bonds between mothers and children, and the multiple ways in which country, class, race and history shape people’s lives.
‘There are books here that are playful and expansive, sweeping and intimate; that stir up long-held secrets, painful memories and unsolved mysteries; that present us with characters on a journey to escape or confront their pasts, or performing roles they have created or that have been foisted upon them.
‘There are books that are quietly devastating and darkly comic; that provide powerful meditations on love, guilt and responsibility; and that cast a satirical eye on the media and identity politics.’
The six-book shortlist will be revealed at a public event, to be held at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on 23 September.
The shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.
The winner will be announced on 10 November at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London and will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels. The winner receives £50,000.
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