On the 8th April the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist was announced. This year's shortlist is said to provide "a ‘miraculous lens through which to view human experience". 

The most influential award for translated fiction announced their 2025 longlist in February. With this latest announcement we see six authors that have made it to the shortlist for the first time. Three of the authors in this year's International Booker Prize shortlist have their debut English-language publications showcased. 

This year's shortlist consists of five novels and one collection of short stories that have been translated from five different original languages. For the first time one of the titles has been translated from Kannada, spoken predominantly southwestern India state of Karnataka and is the first language of 38 million people. 

The selection celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025, as judged by the 2025 panel. This year the highest number of books were submitted by publisher since the prize launched in its current format in 2016. 154 books were initially submitted, whittled down to 13 books for the longlist and 6 for the shortlist by this year's judges.

The full International Book Prize 2025 Shortlist is:

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson

International Booker Prize 2025 Judges

The 2025 judging panel for the International Booker Prize is chaired by Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. Joining him to make up the full panel are: Caleb Femi, prize-winning poet, director and photographer; Publishing Director of Wasafiri, Sana Goyal; International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anoton Hur, and award-winning singer songwriter Beth Orton. 

Commenting on the announcement of the 2025 Shortlist Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, says:

‘This shortlist is the result of a life-enhancing conversation between myself and my fellow judges. Reading 154 books in six months made us feel like high-speed Question Machines hurtling through space. Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.

‘This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.

‘We haven’t chosen these six books because we are book experts who think people need to be told what to read. We have chosen them because we need them, we found them, and we love them. We need literature that shocks, delights and baffles and reveals how weird many of us feel about the way we are living now. Ultimately, these books widen the view. They enhance the quality of conversation we are all having. They don’t shut down debate, they generate it. They don’t have all the answers, but they ask extraordinary questions.’

Key Dates for the International Booker Prize

After the longlist announcement on the 25th February, the shortlist announcement on the 8th April, the winner will be announced on Tuesday the 20th May at a ceremony at the Tate Modern in London.