International Booker Prize 2025 longlist is announced
Thirteen translated books, all by authors nominated for the first time, made the 2025 International Booker Prize longlist chaired by Max Porter.
The longlist for the 2025 International Booker Prize, which rewards fiction translated into English, was announced on 25 February 2025. The £50,000 prize is shared equally between author and translator. The judges were Max Porter (chair), Caleb Femi, Sana Goyal, Anton Hur and Beth Orton.
The thirteen books were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (translated by Sinan Antoon), On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Barbara J Haveland), There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert), Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (Sean Cotter), Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches), Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (Helen Stevenson), Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Polly Barton), Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (Asa Yoneda), Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Daniel Bowles), Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Sophie Hughes), Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (Deepa Bhasthi), On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer (Lucy Scott) and A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (Mark Hutchinson).
All thirteen authors were nominated for the first time. The list comprised eleven novels and two short story collections.
Translated fiction still makes up a small share of what is published in English, and a longlist of this kind is one of the few regular occasions on which translators are named alongside authors. For readers it is a ready-made reading list from a dozen languages; for anyone working in translation it is a reminder that the craft is now openly credited and paid.
Source: The Booker Prizes (Substack): The longlist for the International Booker Prize 2025.