February 25, 2025, 11:01am
The longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize 2025 has been announced.
The annually given prize recognizes international literature in translation. The winning book will receive a £50,000 purse, divided equally between author and translator(s). Shortlisted titles receive £5,000.
This year’s judging panel was chaired by the author Max Porter, and included a prize-winning poet, a photographer, esteemed translators, and the singer-songwriter Beth Orton. This diverse crew of readers selected their list from a record-breaking total of 154 manuscripts.
A few trends to note this year. Many of this year’s longlisted books skew compact, with 11 of the 13 titles coming in at under 250 pages. All authors on the list are making their International Booker debut, and three do so with their first books. And for the first time in the prize’s history, the longlist includes books translated from Kannada and Romanian.
Here’s 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
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 11 novels and two short story collections follow maladjusted digital nomads, refugees, and too-perceptive children. Authors explore dystopian futures and fraught family road trips, sex and disability, migration and madness. We’ve got an epic septology, a lively picaresque, and a long-overlooked queer classic. As usual, independent publishers carried the day.
In a statement, Porter emphasized the importance of literature in translation. “Translated fiction is not an elite or rarefied cultural space requiring expert knowledge; it is the exact opposite. It is stories of every conceivable kind from everywhere, for everyone. It is a miraculous way in which we might meet one another in all our strangeness and sameness, and defy the borders erected between us.” A worthy task for this moment, certainly.
The short list will be announced April 8. In the meantime, you can read excerpts from the longlist titles here.
Image via Yuki Sugiura for the Booker Prize Foundation