The 2025 Booker Prize longlist has been announced, with the chair of judges claiming it may be the best selection in the award’s 56-year history.
British authors secured the highest number of nominations with Natasha Brown, Jonathan Buckley, Andrew Miller, Benjamin Wood, and the Hungarian-British writer David Szalay each landing a spot on the longlist for the prestigious award, which is given annually to a full-length novel written in English.
This year’s selection “champions global perspectives”, and features the highest number of different nationalities in a decade, with India, Malaysia, and Trinidad represented by the nominated authors.
Chair of the judges Roddy Doyle noted that the novels “experiment with form” and “examine the past and poke at our shaky present”.
“It’s a wonderful heap – I don’t think I’ve seen a better one,” Doyle said. “At the end of our last, very long meeting, when we’d added the final book to the heap, we all felt relieved, elated – and maybe a bit proud.”
Nine of the 13 longlisted authors are first-time Booker Prize nominees, with former winner Kiran Desai back on the list 19 years after taking the top prize for her 2006 book The Inheritance of Loss. If the Indian author wins for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – a book that was two decades in the making – she will become the fifth double winner since the prize’s inception in 1969.
Maria Reva and Ledia Xhoga are the only debut novelists on the longlist. Canadian-Ukrainian Reva’s Endling focuses on the journey of three women – and one extremely endangered snail – through contemporary Ukraine during Putin’s invasion, while American-Albanian Xhoga’s Misinterpretation follows an Albanian interpreter wh reluctantly agrees to work with a Kosovar torture survivor.
Two previous shortlisted authors making an appearance on this year’s longlist are Miller, whose novel Oxygen was nominated in 2001, and Szalay, whose book All That Man Is received a nod in 2016.
Miller has now been longlisted for The Land in Winter, a novel set during Britain’s coldest winter, with Szalay nominated for Flesh, a book that uses prose sparingly to depict a portrait of one man’s life as he travels from Hungary to Iraq to London.
Former US professional basketball player Ben Markovits 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.
Also on the longlist are Malaysian writer Tash Aw, Trinidadian author Claire Adam, and American writers Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura.
A shortlist of six titles will be unveiled on 23 September, before the winner is announced on 10 November at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner receives £50,000, while shortlisted authors each win £2,500 along with a specially bound edition of their book.
Booker success can also prompt a huge boost in sales for novelists. In the week after Prophet Song by Irish writer Paul Lynch was announced as last year’s winner, sales increased by 1,500 per cent, and the book climbed to number three on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Other recent Booker winners include Samantha Harvey, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut, Bernadine Evaristo, and Margaret Atwood.
The Booker Prize 2025 longlist in full
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)
Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals)
