‘Mind-expanding books': International Booker prize shortlist announced
British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the fifth time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award's record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted.
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Granta)
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo)
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli)
Six author-translator teams are now in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 20 May, with the prize money divided equally between author and translator.
Japanese writer Kawakami, best known for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, has been shortlisted for her novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. Danish writer Balle and Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland have been chosen for On the Calculation of Volume I, the first of a planned septology in which the protagonist Tara is stuck in a time loop.
'These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive', said author and judging chair Max Porter. 'They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful.'
The shortlisted titles are slim, with four coming in at under 200 pages, including Latronico's Perfection. The novel, about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin, 'transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico's sociological observations', writes Thomas McMullan in the Guardian. 'This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings.'
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, was also selected. The book was written in three weeks, and is based on recordings from a real event in November 2021, when a dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board.
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A book translated from Kannada – a language spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in the state of Karnataka in southwest India – features on the shortlist for the first time in the prize's history this year: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It contains 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, which capture the daily lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.
Completing the shortlist is A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson. Serre wrote the book, about a woman with severe psychological disorders, in six months after the suicide of her sister. 'I wanted to create a memorial to her', said Serre.
The other titles longlisted for this year's prize were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon; There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles; and On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott.
Alongside Porter on this year's judging panel are the poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton.
Authors who have previously won the award include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Lucas Rijneveld. Last year, Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the prize for Kairos.
To explore all of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2025 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Telegraph
5 days ago
- Telegraph
The male novelist isn't extinct – just look at this year's Booker longlist
It appears rumours of the death of the male novelist have been greatly exaggerated. This year's Booker longlist, announced today, bucks recent convention by celebrating this most unfashionable literary creature over hot new faces – six of the 13 authors on the list are men, not to mention middle-aged ones (by contrast, last year's shortlist of six featured five women). With Sarah Jessica Parker on a panel headed by Roddy Doyle, the list plays a curiously straight bat. The men, in particular, are mid-career – Andrew Miller, Benjamin Markovits, David Szalay, Benjamin Wood, Tash Aw and Jonathan Buckley – meaning the list has largely eschewed this year's buzzy debuts. British-Hungarian writer Szalay, one of Granta's Best Young Novelists in 2013, leads the pack with Flesh, his brilliant novel about masculinity, sex and modernity, told through the rags-to-riches life of a Hungarian immigrant. Miller is another venerated, if overlooked, author of exquisitely observed, character-led novels – it's great to see the elegantly atmospheric Our Land in Winter get the nod. Joining them is the 44-year-old Wood, five novels-deep into his career, with his arresting novel, Seascraper, about a 20-year-old loner in a 1960s English coastal town. And, too, Jonathan Buckley: author of 13 radical novels, his career has been maintained through the faith of independent publishers, including his current stable Fitzcarraldo. (These are, let's face it, hardly household names. Instead, they represent the quiet men of – largely – British fiction, toiling away in the slipstreams.) So they are not the usual suspects. There's noticeably no Ian McEwan, whose new and highly anticipated sci-fi novel, What We Can Know, is out in September (although, to be fair, the last time McEwan got the Booker nod was in 2007 for On Chesil Beach). No Alan Hollinghurst, who won in 2004 with The Line of Beauty and whose recent elegiac novel, Our Evenings, was a hotly tipped contender. No Tim Winton, the Australian heavyweight whose admittedly hard-going climate change novel, Juice, has been critically acclaimed. This year's crop of swaggering new talent from across the Irish sea has also been omitted. There's no Wendy Erskine, whose time-bending, polyphonic debut, The Benefactors, has received rave reviews. No Roisín O'Donnell, or John Patrick McHugh, or Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin, whose respective first novels have each been causing a splash. Nor is there much room for the Americans, whose usual dominating presence on the shortlist each year generates palpitations of anxiety about undue American cultural might. 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But at its best it also celebrates the sort of quietly observational, superficially traditional storytelling that has been passed over by critics and judges in recent years – yet which often deliver just as much satisfaction as the most extravagantly hyped new sensation. No doubt this is down to the much more consequential presence of Doyle, who excels at precisely this sort of book. Will one of these underrated writers triumph? My bet is that Szalay, Reva, Wood and Desai are placed to do well, with Szalay's authoritative, deceptively spare examination of male desire at this point, arguably, the leading contender. But with so many dark horses on the field, it's a wide-open race. The 2025 Booker longlist Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidadian) Forty years ago, Dawn, a white Trinidadian teenager, was forced by her family to give up her illegitimate daughter following a brief encounter during Carnival. Now a divorced GP living in London, she has never been able to escape the thought of what she has lost – when, out of the blue, a mysterious Italian woman gets in touch. This is a novel of quiet sadness, steeped in the grief of a life half-lived. Flesh by David Szalay (Hungarian-British) Jonathan Cape David Szalay leads the heavyweights on the list with this critically acclaimed exploration of the socioeconomic forces that shape a single life. A superb novel about sex, money and masculinity, it's the story of István, a teenage offender who moves from a Hungarian council estate to a position of extreme status and wealth – and back again. Universality is playful but modest: it's a literary striptease which comprises alternating chapters from various characters, all linked to an assault on a Yorkshire farm. A novel about the commodification of language and truth, in the age of the sound bite. The South by Tash Aw (Malaysian) 4th Estate It's third time lucky for Tash Aw, one of Malaysia's most venerated authors. He's longlisted once again, this time for a tender epic about a love affair between two boys in an unnamed Asian country. A novel of Proustian luminosity, it's the first in a quartet tracing the lives of a family against the fall-out of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Buckley is a virtuoso stylist, barely known in his native Britain. An elliptical work about memory and selfhood, and comprising mostly a series of fleeting encounters, One Boat centres on a woman retreating in the wake of her father's death – to the same Greek shoreline where she mourned her mother nine years previously. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American) Jonathan Cape In this sprawling, sometimes heavily political novel, a Korean academic disappears the night his daughter nearly drowns. 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Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian-American) Daunt Books Originals An Albanian interpreter based in Brooklyn throws her marriage into crisis when, faced with clients who include refugees, she finds herself unable to draw the line between professional conduct and emotional impulse. A rather earnest debut, about PTSD.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- The Guardian
Most global Booker prize longlist in a decade features Kiran Desai and Tash Aw
Kiran Desai, Tash Aw and David Szalay are among the authors nominated for the 2025 Booker prize, on a longlist that features writers from nine different nationalities – the most global list for a decade. The judging panel, which this year includes Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker alongside Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and chair of judges Roddy Doyle, also chose books by Katie Kitamura, Andrew Miller, Ben Markovits and Jonathan Buckley as part of their 'Booker dozen' longlist of 13 titles. Susan Choi, Natasha Brown and Benjamin Wood were also named as longlistees. Desai makes the longlist with her first book since her Booker prize-winning 2006 novel The Inheritance of Loss. Set to be published in September, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny took almost 20 years to write, and at 667 pages is the longest title on the list. Kiran's mother, Anita Desai, has previously been shortlisted for the Booker three times. 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) The chosen books 'are all alive with great characters and narrative surprises', said Doyle. 'All, somehow, examine identity, individual or national, and all, I think, are gripping and excellent.' Aw is longlisted for the third time for his latest book The South. If he takes home the £50,000 award in November, he will become the first Malaysian to win the prize. Szalay, previously shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is, was this time put forward for Flesh, which traces the story of one man, István, from his teens to midlife. Another past shortlistee, Miller – nominated in 2001 for Oxygen – made this year's list for The Land in Winter. Publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, which has had multiple titles nominated for the International Booker prize for translated fiction, earned its first Booker longlisting this year with Buckley's 13th novel One Boat – which is the slimmest title on the list, coming in at 168 pages. Another independent publisher, Faber, has three titles nominated this year: Brown's Universality, Markovitz's The Rest of Our Lives, and Claire Adam's Love Forms. Penguin imprints see the highest number of titles, with five making the list. Just two debuts appear on the 2025 longlist: Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga and Endling by Maria Reva, which follows three women and an endangered snail travelling in a mobile lab through contemporary Ukraine. It is 'striking that most of the longlisted writers have already had sustained careers', said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion This year's list also features 'the highest number of different nationalities we've seen on a Booker prize longlist for a decade', yet 'British writers are strongly represented too', she added. Five British writers made this year's longlist: Brown, Buckley, Miller, Szalay – who is Hungarian-British – and Benjamin Wood for Seascraper. Four American writers made the cut: Choi for her latest novel Flashlight and Kitamura for Audition along with Xhoga and Markovits. No Irish writers appear on this year's list, despite having strong representation in recent years. Doyle said that whittling down the nominations 'at times' was 'agony'. 153 books were submitted, all written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025. Joining Doyle, Parker and Adébáyọ̀ on this year's panel is the novelist Kiley Reid as well as the writer and critic Chris Power. Parker follows other actors who have judged the prize in recent years, including Adjoa Andoh and Robert Webb. When the panel was announced in December, Wood said that in recent months she had 'enjoyed sharing book recommendations with Sarah Jessica, who has passionately supported contemporary fiction for many years.' In 2016, Parker began serving as editorial director at SJP for Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin, before launching her own imprint, SJP Lit, in partnership with independent publisher Zando in 2023. She also shares book recommendations on her Instagram account. The shortlist will be announced at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday 23 September, with the winner revealed on Monday 10 November. Last year's Booker prize was won by Samantha Harvey for her novel Orbital. Other recent winners include Paul Lynch, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart. To explore all the books on the longlist for the Booker prize 2025 visit Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- The Guardian
This year's Booker prize longlist looks in new directions
This year's Booker judges had a crowded field to pick from, with scores of eligible books from previously nominated writers and five new novels from winners alone (John Banville, Kiran Desai, Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan and Ben Okri). Of these, Hollinghurst is one eyebrow-raising exclusion, for his elegiac and beautifully composed panorama of gay life in Britain over the past seven decades, Our Evenings. But it's no surprise that the list is headed by Desai's epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel in the works since her Booker win two decades ago and due out this September. Clocking in at nearly 700 pages, this is a love story about two people pulled between India and the US, family inheritance and personal ambition, intimacy and solitude. Immersive and gently funny, her vast canvas painted with an exquisitely fine brush, it looks like a leading contender on a canon-building list – nine of the authors are making their first Booker appearance. There is an emphasis on family stories; sometimes intimate and direct, as in Claire Adam's account of a woman forced to give up her baby as a teenager, Love Forms, or Ben Markovits's rueful study of a father contemplating life once the kids have left home, The Rest of Our Lives, but more often as a lens through which to examine the forces of history. 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) Desai's novel is an intricate portrait of an interconnected world, while Tash Aw's The South, the first in a proposed quartet, looks at two farming families in 1990s Malaysia against a backdrop of tumultuous change and ominous signs of climate crisis. Susan Choi's previous novel, 2019's Trust Exercise, was a standout in American fiction; Flashlight is straighter and less playful, but scales up her ambition and breaks new ground in its examination of one family with roots in Korea, Japan and the US, illuminating the seismic effects of political upheaval on individual lives. The two debut novelists on the list respond to the forces of history with formal invention. Canadian-Ukrainian author Maria Reva begins Endling as a comic caper through Ukraine's marriage industry, from the perspective of a cash-strapped scientist with a passion for endangered snails; Russia's full-scale invasion blows the book wide open, calling into question the role of the writer and the purpose of fiction – and offering answers that are full of energy. Albanian-American author Ledia Xhoga toys subtly with realism. Misinterpretation, her portrait of an Albanian interpreter in New York, caught between two cultures and struggling with compassion fatigue and her own traumas as she tries to help others, is full of misunderstandings and missed connections that echo the faults and gaps of translation. Two slim, slippery books revel in formal disruption. Katie Kitamura's enigmatic Audition, focusing on an American actor and a man young enough to be her son, offers contradictory narratives in order to explore identity, performance, and what we are to one another: this is a book to ponder and argue over. In Universality, Natasha Brown is also interested in the power dynamics of storytelling: she constructs a merciless satire of the current media landscape, with its meretricious culture wars, through the jigsaw-puzzle chronicle of a long read that goes viral. The four remaining books are all by men, an answer perhaps to claims that male writing in the UK is in crisis, and they all do fascinating things with interiority. Jonathan Buckley writes spare, slightly Cuskian philosophical novels; in his 13th, One Boat, a woman's sorties to Greece to work through her bereavements lead into reflections on ethics, memory and the processes of thought. In Benjamin Wood's quiet but immensely atmospheric Seascraper, a young man plies his grandfather's trade of 'shanking', scraping the seashore for shrimp in an England that is moving on without him. Muted but precise prose burrows into his hopes and dreams for a tale that resonates far beyond the telling. Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter is also situated in a postwar England on the brink of change, here the 'Big Freeze' of 1962-3, and travels deep into the hearts of its characters, two young married couples in the West Country. This novel has had my heart since it was published last November, and I'm delighted to see it on the list: I think it's the best book yet from a stellar writer who's been publishing for three decades. (By contrast, this year's Booker blow for me is the exclusion of Sarah Hall; I've been telling everyone that her magisterial, millennia-spanning Helm, out at the end of August, was a likely winner.) The final title, also a favourite of mine this year, creates powerful effects through an unusual tactic: utterly refusing interiority. Flesh by David Szalay is a very modern everyman story, with his central character at the mercy of forces beyond his control, a rise and fall playing out across a depressed childhood in Hungary, life in the army and an upwardly mobile stint in on-the-make London. By keeping his antihero a mystery to the reader, Szalay opens up the biggest questions about what we can and cannot know. It feels like something that hasn't been done before in quite this way – and that only fiction could do. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion To explore all the books on the longlist for the Booker prize 2025 visit Delivery charges may apply.
