Your new reading list is ready: Featuring the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist!

          The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist has been announced and Kiran Desai is in the reckoning with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. This is the second time Desai has found a place in the Booker shortlist; in 2006, she had won the Prize (then known as Man Booker Prize) for The Inheritance of Loss. 

        The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.

      In Desai’s own words, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is “a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty”.

      Also nominated for the Prize this year are Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller and Flesh by David Szalay.

      The judges of the Booker Prize 2025 described the books in the shortlist as ‘brilliantly written’ and ‘brilliantly human’.

      The 2025 judging panel, chaired by Roddy Doyle (1993 Booker Prize winner), comprises Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Booker Prize-longlisted novelist), Sarah Jessica Parker (actor, producer, publisher), Chris Power (literary critic, broadcaster), and Kiley Reid (Booker Prize-longlisted novelist).

      Hailed as “the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction”, the annual Booker Prize honours the author of the best original novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The 2025 list was chosen from 153 works published between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.

     The Booker Prize was established in 1969 to celebrate writers of the Commonwealth. The first winner of the award was P.H. Newby for his novel Something to Answer For. In 2014, the Prize was opened to writers from other countries.

     The International Booker Prize (formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize), which recognises a work of fiction originally written in another language and translated to English, was awarded earlier this year to Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp (translated by Deepa Bhasthi). In 2022, Geetanjali Shree, author of Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell), became the first Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize.

      Other authors of Indian origin who have won the Booker Prize are: V. S Naipaul (In a Free State, 1971), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981) Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997), and Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger, 2008).

     The winner of the Booker Prize 2025 will be announced on 10 November 2025 at a ceremony in London.

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