Meet the judges for the International Booker Prize 2025
The panel for next year's International Booker Prize will be chaired by Max Porter, who is joined by Caleb Femi, Sana Goyal, Anton Hur and Beth Orton
The 2025 judges for the International Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of translated fiction, have been announced.
The judging panel will be chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. He will be 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.
The judges will be looking for the best work of long-form fiction or collection of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025.
The International Booker Prize 2025 longlist of 12 or 13 books will be announced on Tuesday, 25 February 2025, and the shortlist of six books on Tuesday, 8 April 2025. The winning title will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, 20 May 2025.
Max Porter, Chair of the International Booker Prize 2025 judges, comments:
‘For the past 20 years, the International Booker has been the prize I’ve been most alert to, grateful for and interested in as a bookseller, editor, author and reader, so I’m thrilled to chair the panel of judges for 2025.
‘Translation is a radical practice, ever more important and worthy of discussion in a polarised world where nuance is often stripped and arguments are corralled into simplistic and counter-productive gutters. The prize and its aims (and its crucial split of prize money between author and translator) is an exemplary, trusted, internationalist treasure of our cultural landscape. I also feel that the novel, now, far from being a form in peril, seems ever more relevant, adaptable, fluid and profound a vehicle for the movement of ideas between consciousnesses. I want to celebrate the complexities and joys of literature and start conversations with readers about what is happening when words, ideas, plots and characters migrate from one language to another.
‘We have a dream team of judges, people I trust and admire and want to spend time with. We gather not as experts to impose our opinions, but as readers, to recommend books. To unpack and discuss them, to test them against the worlds we live in and listen to the questions they ask of us.’
Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, says:
‘The judging panel of the International Booker Prize 2025 is made up of a novelist, a poet, a translator, a critic and a songwriter, all of whom cross boundaries into other art forms. In their various ways, they are steeped in the world of words. That deep expertise, along with their critical judgment as readers and writers, will be vitally important in the private reading and communal judging discussions that will be held over the coming months.’
About the judges
Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize, among others, as well as being shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. Lanny was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was a Sunday Times bestseller and Shy was an instant number one bestseller. Porter has written the adapted screenplay of Shy, to be filmed by Netflix in 2024. He has also written The Death of Francis Bacon, The Hill, the short film All of this Unreal Time and the pamphlet It’s Going to Be a Bright New Day. His original drama series The Photographer is playing on BBC Radio 4 now. His work has been translated into 33 languages.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a frequent collaborator with, and mentor to, musicians, artists, theatre makers and arts and literacy charities. He was previously Editorial Director at Granta Books, where he published The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which won the Booker Prize 2013, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang, winner of the International Booker Prize 2016.
Caleb Femi is a writer, director and photographer, and was featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. Femi’s award-winning debut poetry collection, Poor, was published in 2020 by Penguin Press, and won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2021. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the Jhalak Prize, was selected as a Book of the Year by the New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer and BBC and was added to AQA's English Literature GCSE syllabus in the UK in 2022.
He has directed TV episodes for HBO, the BBC and Netflix, as well as commercials, high-fashion films and runway shows for brands such as Louis Vuitton, TikTok, Bottega Veneta, Dior, Mulberry and NCS. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Young People’s Laureate for London, working with young people on a city, national and global level. His next work, The Wickedest, will be published by Fourth Estate in September 2024.
Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of the British literary magazine Wasafiri, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2024. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Anton Hur’s translation from Korean of Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was also longlisted for the International Booker in 2022, making him the third translator in history to be double-longlisted in the same year. His co-translation of Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and his translations of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets and Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence were consecutively longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
As a novelist in his own right, Hur is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). He was born in Stockholm and currently lives in Seoul. He studied law and psychology at Korea University and specialized in Victorian poetry at the Seoul National University Graduate School English programme. He is the recipient of a PEN Translates grant and a PEN/Heim grant. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference.
Beth Orton is a BRIT Award-winning, multiple Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter. She has released seven acclaimed solo albums over the past 27 years, showcasing her lyrical power as a songwriter across a career in which music has always been a vehicle for the exploration of words.
In 2022 Orton released her first entirely self-produced album, Weather Alive, on Partisan Records. It was reviewed by Pitchfork as ‘the best work of her career’ and appeared on many year-end best lists, including The New York Times.
Orton has collaborated with artists such as The Chemical Brothers, Andrew Weatherall, Bert Jansch and Nick Cave. Her touring has taken her across the world, headlining performances at the Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Glastonbury Festival, Carnegie Hall and beyond.
Submissions for the International Booker Prize 2025
The judges will be looking for the best work of long-form fiction or collection of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025. Publishers are now invited to submit their books here.
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