Introducing the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2025
The six books provide a ‘miraculous lens through which to view human experience’, and feature six authors shortlisted for the first time
The shortlist for this year’s International Booker Prize, which celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English, is announced today.
Comprised of five novels and one collection of short stories, the six ‘mind-expanding books’ – which Chair of the 2025 judges Max Porter described as a ‘vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity’ – are as follows:
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson
The shortlisted books feature stories that capture the indomitability of the human spirit, from AI ‘mothers’ parenting manufactured children in a futuristic world to the resilience of girls and women in patriarchal communities in southern India; from a protagonist forced to relive the same day over and over to the distress calls of migrants on a small boat in the Channel; from the agony and joy of lifelong friendship in the shadow of mental illness to a couple’s search for meaningful connections in their digitally curated lives.
Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, says:
‘This shortlist is the result of a life-enhancing conversation between myself and my fellow judges. Reading 154 books in six months made us feel like high-speed Question Machines hurtling through space. Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.
‘This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. 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. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.’
What the judges said about each book on the shortlist
The shortlist has been chosen by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. Porter is joined by prize-winning poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton. Read on to hear what they had to say about each book on the shortlist.
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
‘A life is contained inside the melancholy of an endlessly repeating wintry day. Reading this book is an act of meditation and contemplation.’
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson
‘An unflinching use of literature to ask the most uncomfortable but urgent question of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?’
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda
‘A beguiling, radical, mind- and heart-expanding journey into humanity's future. The visionary strangeness is utterly enchanting.'
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes
‘A pitch-perfect, profound and agonisingly well-observed account of the existential malaise of millennial life.’
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
‘Stories about encroaching modernity, as told through the lives of Mlonguslim women in southern India. An invigorating reading experience.’
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson
‘A masterful lesson in how we remember the lives of those bound up with our own. It holds the fragility of life in its hands with the utmost care.’
Which books on the shortlist have you read, or will you add to your TBR pile? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below…
Read leopard skin hat - I couldn’t put it down so sad and profoundly beautiful. I don’t speak French but I love that Mark Hutchinson does- he must be in totally sync with Anne Serre to capture this prose so out of this world! And now in the middle of The Eye of the Big Bird, my imagination is cracked open! How did Kawakami Bring this story on to the page. It is a mind blowing scary future! I mildly followed booker international before- but now I’m a devoted fan. Wow- what a feast of reading! I intend to visit some of the back list to broaden my knowledge of the literature of our crazy world!
Thank you indeed for the list …I remind myself here that this is one of the main reasons for Substack being an important ‘entity’ …for writers and artists….thanks.