Booker Prize 2025: The Most Diverse Shortlist in 56-Year History

Judges chairman Roddy Doyle said the novels were "experimental with form". "The list is fantastic. I don't think I've ever seen a line-up like it," he said.

This year's shortlist includes Kiran Desai, Tash Aw, David Szalay, Katie Kitamura, Andrew Miller, Ben Markovits, Jonathan Buckley, Susan Choi, Natasha Brown, Benjamin Wood and Claire Adam. Nine of the 13 finalists are first-time nominees.

Standing out among the nominees is Indian-born writer Kiran Desai, who joins the competition 19 years after she won the top prize for The Legacy of Loss in 2006. If she wins with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which has been in the works for two decades, she will become only the fifth writer to win twice in the history of the prize. The book, due to be released in September, tells the story of two American immigrants returning to their native India and accidentally meeting on a night train. At nearly 700 pages, the judges called it a "massive and compelling" work that "wraps a magical realist fable in a social novel woven into a love story."

Tash Aw is also a notable name, making his third appearance with The South . If he wins in November, he will become the first Malaysian writer to win the Booker Prize.

According to Booker Prize director Gaby Wood, most of this year's nominees have long writing careers.

This year's judging panel includes Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker and three previous Booker Prize nominees/winners: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Roddy Doyle and Kiley Reid. Critic Chris Power also completes the shortlist.

Established in 1969, the Booker is one of the most prestigious prizes in literature, awarded annually for a novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Last year's winner was Samantha Harvey's Orbital , about astronauts on the International Space Station.

Other recent Booker Prize winners include Samantha Harvey, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut, Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, with Atwood being the most recent to have won the prize twice.

Last year, the Booker Prize went to Samantha Harvey for Orbital , while in previous years the winners have been Paul Lynch, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart.

This year’s judging panel will read through the 13 shortlisted works and then draw up a shortlist of six books, which will be announced on 23 September before the winner is announced on 10 November at a ceremony in Old Billingsgate, London. The winner will receive £50,000, while the shortlisted authors will receive £2,500 and a special edition hardback.

The success of the Booker Prize in recent years has boosted sales of novels. In the week after Irish author Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song was announced as last year’s winner, for example, sales rose 1,500% and the book climbed to number three on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

Source: https://baogialai.com.vn/giai-booker-2025-danh-sach-de-cu-da-dang-nhat-trong-lich-su-56-nam-post563332.html