International Booker Prize Announces Six Books for Its Shortlist

The shortlist for the 2025 International Booker Prize has been announced. It is one of the world's most influential awards for translated fiction.

International Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist

The shortlist for the 2025 International Booker Prize has been announced. The prize is one of the world's most influential awards for translated fiction since its launch in 2005. The Booker Prize is annually organised to celebrate the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

As addressed by the Chair of the 2025 International Booker Prize, Max Porter:

This list (shortlist) is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity.

The shortlist featured six books: five novels and one collection of short stories as selected by the Judging Panel. The latter includes Max Porter, bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author; Caleb Femi, prize-winning poet, director and photographer; Sana Goyal, writer and publishing director of Waafari; Anton Hur, author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator; and Beth Orton, award-winning singer-songwriter.

Interestingly, for the first time, the list featured six authors who were selected for the first time for the prize among other 154 books, including three with their debut English-language publications.

Rightly deserving of its prestige, the prize awards translators £50,000, divided equally between the author and the translator(s). Also, the shortlisted entries get €5,000 while maintaining the same percentage between the translator(s) and the author.

The shortlisted books for the 2025 International Booker Prize are:

• A Leopard-Skin Hat
• Heart Lamp
• Perfection
• Under the Eye of the Big Bird
• Small Boat
• On the Calculation of Volume I

The announcement of the prize winner is slated to be made on May 20 at Tate Modern, London.

About the Shortlisted Books

1. A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre. Translated by Mark Hutchinson.

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Synopsis:

A Leopard-Skin Hat is the story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. 

A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her.

As described by the Judging Panel, the book is "a story so beautifully realised – and translated so sensitively by Mark Hutchinson – that the pair become part of the life of the reader. A perfectly balanced book, slender in size but bearing significant weight all the way through, A Leopard-Skin Hat is a testament to the ways in which we continue to hold the people we love in our memories, with respect and dignity, after they die."

2. Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq. Translated by Deepa Bhasthi.

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Synopsis:

Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 stories which exquisitely capture the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.

The Judging Panel gave an apparently strong perspective to the story for its portrayal "of the lives of those often on the periphery of society: girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India. These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, and violence. Yet, at its heart, Heart Lamp returns us to the true, great pleasures of reading: solid storytelling, unforgettable characters, vivid dialogue, tensions simmering under the surface, and a surprise at each turn. Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper."

3. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. Translated by Sophie Hughes.

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Synopsis:

Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence – scathing and affecting in equal measure.

As succinctly, but accurately, reviewed by the Judging Panel, Perfection is "an astute, cringe-making and often laugh-out-loud funny portrait of everyday privilege and modern aspirations".

4. Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. Translated by Asa Yoneda.

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Synopsis:

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is an inventive and immersive speculative novel about a future in which humans are nearing extinction – from the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo.

The Judging Panel described it as a piece that tells the story of humanity’s evolution on an epic scale with crystalline clarity. Thus, resonating with the present moments and the not-so-distant future.

5. Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix. Translated by Helen Stevenson.

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Synopsis:

November 2021: an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes in the Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. How and why did it happen?

An excerpt from the Judging Panel's review gave a more parallel view of the novel for being revealing. According to the panel, "Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit – and whether we could all do better. A gut-punch of a novel."

6. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. Translated by Barbara J. Haveland.

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Synopsis:

In the first part of Solvej Balle’s epic septology, Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November.

Describing On the Calculation of Volume I, the Judging Panel said, "The story takes a potentially familiar narrative trope – a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day – and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist, to want to be alive, to need to share one’s time with others. The sheer quality of the sentences was what struck us most, rendered into English with deft, invisible musicality by the translator."

In anticipation of the announcement of the prize winners, we heartily congratulate the shortlisted authors and translators. Thank you for promoting storytelling.