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Journalism of Courage
Two of India’s most acclaimed literary voices — Booker Prize winners Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai — are among the 18 finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize, one of the richest awards in the literary world.
Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things and has since become as well known for her political essays as her fiction, is shortlisted in nonfiction for her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Desai, the 2006 Booker winner for The Inheritance of Loss, returns to the spotlight with her new novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which earned a place among the six fiction finalists. Incidentally, Desai’s novel has also made it to the 2025 Booker Prize longlist.
The rest of the fiction shortlist reflects a wide range of styles and preoccupations, including Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness; Allegra Goodman’s Isola, Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, and David Szalay’s Flesh.
Nonfiction finalists alongside Roy include Scott Anderson’s King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story, Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea, Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World, and Imani Perry’s Black in Blues.
The young readers’ categories are divided into three: picture books, middle grade, and young adult. This year’s selections range from Brian Floca and Sydney Smith’s Island Storm and Thao Lam’s Everybelly to Derrick Barnes’s The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze and Triinu Laan’s John the Skeleton, illustrated by Marja-Liisa Plats. For young adults, Moa Backe Åstot’s Butterfly Heart and Candace Fleming’s Death in the Jungle, a true-crime narrative about Jonestown, complete the slate.
“In a time of shortened attention spans and endless news feeds, books have the unique power to slow us down, to help us to think deeply and imagine freely,” Tom Beer, editor in chief of Kirkus Reviews, said.
Founded in 2014, the Kirkus Prize has established itself as one of the most coveted awards in literature, notable for its $50,000 (about ₹41.6 lakh) purse in each category. Previous winners include Percival Everett (James), Héctor Tobar (Our Migrant Souls), and Christina Soontornvat (All Thirteen). Books are eligible only if they have received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, a distinction reserved for about 10 percent of its coverage.
Winners of the 2025 prize will be announced on October 8.
