The Booker Prize 2025 Winners LIVE Updates: And the winner is Flesh by David Szalay

And the winner is ...

Within weeks, two of the most coveted literary crowns — the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize — now rest on Hungarian heads.

László Krasznahorkai, the reclusive visionary of despair, claimed the Nobel for his haunting explorations of spiritual collapse. And tonight in London’s Old Billingsgate, David Szalay won the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, his stark and unsettling study of modern masculinity.

The air was electric as Roddy Doyle stepped up to the podium. When he announced, “The winner of the 2025 Booker Prize is Flesh,” the room erupted.
David Szalay — Hungarian-British author of six works — became the first writer of his heritage to claim the prize. His stark, daring novel Flesh was born of doubt and creative risk, themes that threaded through his emotional acceptance speech.

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For Szalay, who began Flesh after abandoning another novel, the victory closes a circuit between London and Hungary, between risk and resolve. Doyle’s parting advice to the new laureate was characteristically wry: “Say no to everything. Get home as quickly as you can. Lock the door.”

David Szalay, winner of the 2025 Booker Prize for Flesh, was born in Canada, grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. He is the author of six works of fiction, translated into more than 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut, London and the South-East, won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is received the Gordon Burn Prize and the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. He was selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and appeared on the Telegraph’s top 20 British writers under 40 in 2010.

Flesh, Szalay’s sixth work of fiction, is a taut, time-spanning novel that moves from a Hungarian housing estate to London’s gilded enclaves. Written in his trademark spare prose, it dissects detachment and longing with surgical precision. Flesh focusses on an emotionally detached man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. The novel is the sixth work of fiction by David Szalay, who was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.

Read our review.

A standing ovation fills the auditorium in London as David Szalay was named the 2025 Booker Prize winner for his novel Flesh. The Hungarian-British author accepted the award with humility and a smile that betrayed his disbelief.

“It was important that we did take the risk. I think fiction can take risks — aesthetic, formal, and moral — in ways other forms cannot,” says David Szalay. “That’s part of what makes the novel so alive. It’s relatively easy to produce — all you really need is to keep the writer supplied with coffee and a few essentials.”

The winner is Flesh by David Szalay.

“Though my father was from Hungary, I always felt a kind of outsider,” says David Szalay, whose novel Flesh made it to this year’s Booker Prize shortlist.
He adds that the book was born out of a wish “to bridge the distance between London and Hungary.

After the two judges said their bit, we treated to a short jazz interlude. Stay tuned...

Booker judges Sarah Jessica Parker and Kiley Reid take the stage for an evening of literature, conversation, and celebration. They discuss how they read all the books, and took a call on which one merited the award.

Follow our Booker Live Blog for moment-by-moment updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and reactions as the shortlist comes to life.

The Booker Prize 2025 ceremony has begun.

Stay tuned as we bring you real-time updates, reactions, and the winner announcement. Will Kiran Desai make history as a two-time winner, or will Andrew Miller, fresh off his Walter Scott Prize win, take the crown? Follow along here for every moment from red carpet arrivals to the final reveal.

Around 3,000 people have tuned in to the live stream and the number is steadily increasing. Meanwhile, the chat is busy as ever with people announcing from what part in the world they are joining in from, and rooting for their favourite author. Some are wondering when the stream will truly begin, while others are distracted by what's on the menu! Can't say I blame them!

With less than two minutes to go, 1,465 people are awaiting the live stream to begin.

The livestream to announce the winner will begin in a few minutes. Stay tuned!

Here's what Booker judge Kiley Reid had to say:

Sound advice from Lennie James.

Do you agree?

Another bit of trivia as we await the results. Digital submissions replaced print copies in 2020, simplifying the process for global publishers. Online judging also began during the Covid period. The virtual meetings of that year’s panel produced Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain as winner, a decision reached entirely via video conference.

As we wait for the announcement to be televised live! It is a good time to remember the first televised ceremony aired on the BBC in 1976. It introduced dramatic readings, interviews, and the suspense of the envelope moment.

Television exposure turned the Booker from a trade event into a national ceremony, the legacy continues internationally on streaming platforms today.

The prize will be announced at 3 am IST (9.30 pm GMT). Six books have made to the shortlist:

📌 David Szalay’s Flesh,

📌British writer Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter,

📌American novelist Susan Choi’s Flashlight,

📌American writer Katie Kitamura’s Audition,

📌Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,

📌The Rest of Our Lives by British-American writer Ben Markovits.

It is past midnight here in India, but bibliophiles across the country are eagerly awaiting the Booker winner to be announced. Should Kiran Desai win, it would mean a clean sweep for India, with Bhanu Mushtaq winning the 2025 International Booker Prize for her short story collection Heart Lamp, which was translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi.

The Booker Prize may be handed out in London, but it has long belonged to the world, and India claims its corner with pride. Tonight’s shortlist is a cocktail of experience, risk, and memory. So settle in, refill that cup, we will know the winner in half an hour. May the best author win!

Keri Hulme, winner in 1985 for The Bone People, thanked only her publisher and left the stage. Her briefness contrasted with later years’ lengthy tributes. Hulme was the first New Zealander to win, and her silence matched her reclusive career.

The record for length belongs to Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) at 848 pages. Catton was 28, the youngest winner in the prize’s history. Her astronomical structure mirrored the Victorian serials she admired. The combination of youth and ambition revived interest in large-form narrative just as short novels had dominated.

Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) is often cited as the briefest Booker winner at around 190 pages. Its victory divided critics; some called it minor McEwan, others admired its economy. The episode illustrates that the Booker occasionally rewards precision over scale.

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other shared the 2019 Booker, making her the first Black British woman to win. Her multi-voiced structure expanded definitions of the contemporary British novel. The recognition also prompted wider discussion about diversity in British publishing, long an unspoken weakness of the prize’s ecosystem.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) changed both the prize and the novel’s possibilities. Its fusion of politics, magic, and Indian English style made it an instant classic. It later won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of Booker (2008). Rushdie’s success confirmed that the prize could reward linguistic risk, not just realism.

Here's what she said about whether all books can be adapted into film:

John Berger’s G won in 1972, but his acceptance speech eclipsed the novel. Berger denounced Booker McConnell’s colonial profits and donated half his prize money to the British Black Panther Movement. It was the first open political moment in the ceremony and set a pattern for later years: the Booker as both literary platform and public conscience.

Roddy Doyle, Chair of Judges, is in the house! The acclaimed author says that serving as Chair has reminded him of his 14 years as a secondary school teacher, ensuring that everyone gets their turn to speak.

The evening’s host Shabaz Ali, known for his viral comedy persona “Shabaz Says”, is welcoming guests on the Red carpet.

Meanwhile, Samantha Harvey, winner of the 2024 has arrived. She says she is nervous about her speech and that last year's award ceremony was a blur for her!

The prize will be announced at 3 am IST (9.30 pm GMT). Six books have made to the shortlist:

📌 David Szalay’s Flesh,

📌British writer Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter,

📌American novelist Susan Choi’s Flashlight,

📌American writer Katie Kitamura’s Audition,

📌Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,

📌The Rest of Our Lives by British-American writer Ben Markovits.

Judges are appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation’s advisory committee. Each panel includes a mix of a novelist, a critic, an academic, and sometimes a public figure or journalist. They serve for one year only, preventing institutional bias. Meetings usually begin in February, with long-list discussions by mid-year and the final deliberation in October or November. The emphasis is on independence; even sponsors have no access to drafts or votes.

Every Nobel Literature winner of the past five years, from Abdulrazak Gurnah and Annie Ernaux to Jon Fosse, Han Kang and László Krasznahorkai, has been either a Booker or International Booker laureate or shortlistee. Coincidence, clairvoyance, or literary kinship?

The first Booker cheque in 1969 was £5,000. By the 1980s it had risen to £20,000, and since the Man Group era it has stayed near £50,000. The Foundation also gives £2,500 to each shortlisted author. The consistency of this figure has helped stabilise the prize’s profile even as sponsorships changed. For many writers, the monetary award is less significant than the sales spike that follows within days of the announcement.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) made history twice. Her Thomas Cromwell trilogy revived interest in the historical novel as serious art. Mantel’s research and psychological depth changed the genre’s reputation from decorative to diagnostic.

She became the first woman to win twice and the first to do so for consecutive volumes. The third book, The Mirror and the Light, made the shortlist in 2020 but did not win, completing a rare literary trilogy of sustained acclaim.

In 2019, the judges broke their own rule against joint winners, naming both Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. It was the first time a Black British woman won the Booker and the first shared decision in nearly three decades. The Booker Foundation reinstated the “no ties” rule afterward

In 1997, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things won unanimously. It was India’s first Booker triumph and one of the fastest-selling literary novels in history. Roy became an overnight cultural figure, and her book’s Malayalam-inflected English changed expectations of style.

The jury’s decision also marked a turning point in recognising non-Western narratives as central, not peripheral. Nearly 30 years later, Roy’s influence still threads through discussions of Indian writing in English.

Until 2002, eligibility was limited to writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland, and Zimbabwe. The change to allow any English-language author published in the UK was controversial. Critics feared American dominance; supporters argued for inclusion. Twenty-three years on, both sides proved partly right. US writers have featured often but not overwhelmed the field. The Booker’s broadened scope reflects the global reality of publishing, where English circulates through multiple centres of gravity rather than one imperial hub.

Fun fact!

A quirk in rule changes once left an entire publishing year unjudged. When eligibility shifted from the previous calendar year to the current one in 1971, books published in 1970 were skipped. Decades later, archivists dubbed it “The Lost Booker.” In 2010, a special retrospective panel awarded the missing prize to J G Farrell for Troubles.

After P. H. Newby, early winners included Bernice Rubens (1970, The Elected Member), J. G. Farrell (1973, The Siege of Krishnapur), and Nadine Gordimer (1974, The Conservationist).

These books shared a post-imperial outlook, exploring the moral and political consequences of British decline. The Booker quickly established itself as a space where the old empire’s stories were re-examined by both colonisers and colonised. The themes, displacement, class, identity, still define many of the novels honoured years later.

From 2002 to 2019, the prize carried the name “Man Booker” after financial group Man Group plc became sponsor. The partnership brought larger prize money (£50,000) and a global marketing push that helped the award gain international recognition.

During that period, winners included Arundhati Roy, Hilary Mantel, and Aravind Adiga. In 2019, Man Group withdrew and sponsorship passed to Crankstart, the charitable foundation of Sir Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman. The name qreverted to “The Booker Prize,” restoring its original identity while keeping the higher endowment intact.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 by Booker McConnell Ltd, a British food-distribution company with Caribbean operations. The first award went to P. H. Newby for Something to Answer For, a post-Suez novel about moral confusion. The initial prize money was £5,000 and the goal simple, to raise the profile of the literary novel in a market dominated by non-fiction. Few expected it to last. Within a decade, though, the Booker had become Britain’s most argued-over award, known as much for controversy as prestige.

The editors' pick:

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Susan Choi has built one of the most versatile and acclaimed careers in contemporary American fiction.

Her debut, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction, and her follow-ups have gathered an impressive constellation of honors: American Woman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist (2004), A Person of Interest a PEN/Faulkner finalist (2009), and My Education won a Lambda Literary Award (2014).

Her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, a sharp, genre-defying exploration of truth and power, won the National Book Award for Fiction and became a U.S. bestseller. Her sixth novel, Flashlight, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, began as a short story in The New Yorker and later won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.

A trustee of PEN America and professor at Johns Hopkins University, Choi continues to challenge how stories are told, and how memory shapes the telling.

Read our review

Born in New Delhi and educated in India, England, and the United States, Kiran Desai is one of contemporary literature’s most celebrated voices.

Her debut, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, won international acclaim across 22 countries, but it was her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, that made history, winning the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006, and establishing her as a defining writer of migration and belonging.

Nearly two decades later, Desai returned with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 — a sweeping, deeply humane story of love, distance, and rediscovery. Named among the Economic Times’ 20 Most Influential Global Indian Women, Desai continues to live and write in New York, carrying forward a literary legacy that began with her mother, the acclaimed novelist Anita Desai.

Born in Sacramento, California, Katie Kitamura is an American novelist, journalist, and art critic whose prose balances restraint with quiet intensity.

A Princeton graduate with a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium, she has written five novels translated into more than 20 languages.

Her fourth, Intimacies, was named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and even made Barack Obama’s year-end reading list.

A recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and fellowships from Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations, Kitamura also writes for Granta, The Guardian, and frieze.

Her fifth novel, Audition, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, blurs the boundaries between performance and truth, confirming Kitamura as one of contemporary fiction’s most disciplined and hypnotic voices.

The author was born in California and raised between Texas, London and Berlin.

A Yale and Oxford graduate who once played professional basketball in Germany, he’s now the author of 12 novels, including Either Side of Winter, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, and his 2025 Booker-shortlisted The Rest of Our Lives.

His writing, featured in the Guardian, Granta, The Paris Review and The New York Times, blends wit, melancholy, and moral inquiry, tracing the private disappointments that define public lives.

Named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013), Markovits also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Eccles Writer in Residence Award. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Read the review:

Born in Bristol and now based in Somerset, Andrew Miller is one of Britain’s most accomplished novelists. Educated at Middlesex Polytechnic, Lancaster University, and the University of East Anglia, where he studied under Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain, Miller has written ten novels translated into over 20 languages.

His debut, Ingenious Pain (1997), swept international prizes including the James Tait Black, IMPAC Dublin, and Grinzane Cavour awards. Oxygen (2001) earned him his first Booker shortlist, while Pure (2011) won the Costa Book of the Year.

His 2025 novel, The Land in Winter, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, revisits the frozen landscapes of 1960s England to explore love, endurance, and memory.

A former social worker and TEFL teacher in Japan and Spain, Miller is also a sailor, aikido black belt, and mandolin player, a man as attuned to rhythm in life as in prose. Read our review of The Land in Winter.

Only three hours to go! Till then stay tuned as we share trivia, fun facts, reviews and interviews.

(Credit: The Booker Prize/YouTube)

Born in Canada, raised in London, and now based in Vienna, David Szalay is one of the sharpest observers of contemporary manhood.

The author of six works of fiction that have been translated into more than 20 languages, he first drew acclaim with London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes. His breakout, All That Man Is, won the Gordon Burn and Plimpton Prizes, and earned him a Booker shortlist in 2016.

A decade later, he returns with Flesh, a spare, devastating look at power, privilege, and emotional paralysis. Named among Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013), Szalay remains the master of quiet unease and razor-sharp restraint. Check out the review.

Whether you want to know what the critics said about your favourite novel, or want to know whether the books are to your taste, we have you covered. Check out our reviews:

📌 David Szalay’s Flesh,

📌British writer Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter,

📌American novelist Susan Choi’s Flashlight,

📌American writer Katie Kitamura’s Audition,

📌Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,

📌The Rest of Our Lives by British-American writer Ben Markovits.

Hodder & Stoughton’s Sceptre imprint, known for championing sophisticated, emotionally intelligent fiction, published Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, a wry, midlife road novel across America. Sceptre has had six Booker-shortlisted titles before, but no winners yet. Could 2025 finally change that? This might be the year the underdog drives home a win.

The only independent publisher on the 2025 Booker shortlist, Faber & Faber continues its storied run with Susan Choi’s Flashlight, a dazzling, shape-shifting family drama about disappearance, grief, and identity.

With seven Booker wins in its history, most recently Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018), Faber once again proves that literary excellence can thrive outside corporate giants.

Penguin Random House (PRH) commands this year’s Booker lineup, publishing four of the six shortlisted novels.

📌 Jonathan Cape brings Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter and David Szalay’s Flesh, two sharp, introspective studies of endurance and identity.

📌Hamish Hamilton returns with Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the author’s long-awaited comeback after her 2006 Booker win.

📌Fern Press, appearing on the shortlist for the first time, publishes Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a sleek psychological novel about performance and reality.

Fifty years ago, the Booker Prize pulled off a literary hat trick two winners, one scandal, and a very awkward dinner at Claridge’s. South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) shared the award with Nottingham’s Stanley Middleton (Holiday), after judge Elizabeth Jane Howard championed her husband Kingsley Amis’s novel. When that didn’t fly, the panel settled for a split decision, and the first joint Booker in history. One author went on to win the Nobel; the other went back to teaching English.

In 1975, the Booker Prize caused uproar by shortlisting just two novels — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (the winner) and Thomas Keneally’s Gossip from the Forest. Judge Roy Fuller called most modern fiction “rubbish” and refused to include more. Fellow judge Susan Hill later admitted, “I wish we hadn’t caved in.”

It is the elite club every novelist secretly dreams of joining: the double Booker winners. So far, that honour belongs to Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, J. M. Coetzee, and Peter Carey. Tonight, both Kiran Desai and Andrew Miller have a shot at joining them.

India could claim both Bookers this year. Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi already won the International Booker for Heart Lamp, their luminous Kannada novel. If Kiran Desai wins tonight, it will be a clean sweep, one prize for English, one for translation.

If Kiran Desai lifts the trophy tonight, it will feel like a long-postponed family celebration. Her mother, Anita Desai, was thrice shortlisted but never won, leaving a kind of elegant unfinished sentence in Indian literary history.

Kiran Desai’s win would be the perfect epilogue to a story that began decades ago in Delhi. Anita Desai gave us stillness; Kiran Desai gave that stillness a pulse. Whatever the outcome, the Desai household will forever be remembered for their generational genius.

This year’s shortlist is a veteran’s table. Six writers, 41 previous novels, and zero first-timers. Chair Roddy Doyle calls it “a triumph of control and confidence.” In a literary climate that often crowns discovery, the judges have chosen mastery.Each of these authors has written their way through failure, revision, and renewal.

Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives begins with a middle-aged professor dropping his daughter at college and driving aimlessly west. It is the slow reckoning of a man inventorying his choices. Yet it glows with melancholy humour and rare clarity. Markovits captures midlife not as crisis but as recalibration.

The prose hums with fatigue and forgiveness, turning ordinariness into something magnificent and poignant. If the Booker jury wants emotional subtlety over spectacle, Markovits might just take the scenic route to the prize.

Katie Kitamura’s Audition is a cool, unsettling performance about performance itself. Its nameless actress rehearses a play that might never premiere, speaking lines that slip into her real life.

The novel refuses explanation, it simply unfolds like a slow, controlled exhale. Every paragraph feels choreographed, every silence intentional. Some readers find it aloof; others, mesmerising.

The judges, meanwhile, admire its “eerie precision.” In a world constantly posting itself, Audition asks the hardest question: what happens when you stop performing? Kitamura’s calm could be this shortlist’s stealth weapon — quiet on the page, unforgettable in the mind.

Flashlight began as a short story and evolved into Susan Choi’s most intricate novel yet. It is a generational mystery about disappearance, inheritance, and the slippery nature of truth. A father vanishes; decades later, his absence becomes the family’s unspoken language.

Choi’s prose is brisk but tender, her structure dazzling without vanity. Critics say it “dominates your thoughts while you read.” It’s the sort of book that lingers, the kind you finish and immediately reopen to trace how it worked its spell. If the Booker loves intelligence married to heart, and it usually does — Flashlight may burn brightest tonight.

With Flesh, David Szalay takes a scalpel to modern manhood. His protagonist István drifts from a rough Hungarian childhood to the polished unease of London’s elite, haunted by guilt and ambition. The sentences are bare, the emotions raw — a study in restraint that leaves bruises.

“It’s about the body as destiny,” Szalay told one interviewer, “and the cost of pretending it isn’t.” The result is fiction as X-ray: nothing hidden, everything illuminated. Readers may flinch, but they’ll keep reading. If the judges are in the mood for austerity that aches, Flesh could easily muscle its way to victory.

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is the quietest novel to cause this much noise. Set during Britain’s 1962 “Big Freeze,” it captures human fragility through a landscape locked in ice. The prose is so restrained it feels sculpted, yet emotion seeps through every crack.

Miller, a past shortlistee, has long specialised in the unspectacular dramas of endurance; here he achieves something crystalline.

In an era obsessed with maximalism, his minimalism feels almost radical. Judges have called it “hypnotic in its control.” If the Booker panel decides understatement is the new grand gesture, expect a blizzard of applause.

It has been nearly twenty years since Kiran Desai last climbed the Booker podium with The Inheritance of Loss. Her comeback novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, sprawls across continents and inner lives. It is a story of migration, class, and longing written with devastating beauty.

Can she become the fifth author in history to win twice? Critics call the book “a love story built on silence,” readers call it a reason to believe in the big novel again.

For Indian audiences, it is nostalgia and newness entwined, a homecoming for a writer who turned exile into art. Whether she wins or not, Desai’s return already feels like the year’s defining literary event.

The Land in Winter leads as the bookies’ pick, but with such a strong shortlist, it is anyone’s game. A single judge’s turn of heart could flip these numbers on their head by the time the envelope opens at 9.30pm GMT, which is 3am IST. So, stay tuned!

Odds: 8/1 | Implied Probability: 11.1%

Choi’s innovative, form-breaking storytelling is thrillingly unpredictable, and so is her position on the betting board. She might just be the surprise everyone talks about.

Odds: 6/1 | Implied Probability: 14.3%

Lean, tense, and profoundly moving, Flesh is classic Szalay, an amalgamation of sharp-edged realism with emotional punch. A critic’s favourite, but will it win over the judges tonight?

Stylish and cerebral, Audition dazzles with its meditation on truth and performance. Kitamura already has a Booker-longlisted hit under her belt — could this be her moment?

Quietly devastating, deeply human — Markovits’s exploration of love and aging has quietly built momentum. A dark horse, but one with emotional staying power.

A close second. The Booker-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss returns with a luminous, heart-tugging novel about friendship and belonging. Desai could easily reclaim her crown.

The frontrunner! Miller’s stark and poetic tale of survival in a frozen world has struck a chord with readers and critics alike. Could he turn that critical frost into golden heat tonight?

With hours to go before the Booker Prize 2025 winner is announced, the bookmakers have spoken — and the odds are tight! Over the next six posts I will reveal how the numbers stack up for this year’s six shortlisted novels. So, stay tuned!

As many as 13 authors made it to the longlist, of which only six were selected in the shortlist. Here are the 7 authors who who were initially contenders for the title:

📌 Claire Adam – Love Forms

📌 Tash Aw – The South

📌 Natasha Brown – Universality

📌 Jonathan Buckley – One Boat

📌 Maria Reva – Endling

📌 Benjamin Wood – Seascraper

📌Ledia Xhoga – Misinterpretation

Six books, six different worlds. Here’s who’s in the running tonight:

📌 David Szalay – Flesh

📌 Andrew Miller – The Land in Winter

📌 Ben Markovits – The Rest of Our Lives

📌 The Booker Prizes

📌 Katie Kitamura – Audition

📌 Kiran Desai – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

📌 Susan Choi – Flashlight

The expansive list takes us from Hungary to Japan, Italy to the US, India to England, and through decades of family histories, love stories, and quiet revolutions. Expect tears, laughter, and maybe a few existential crises.

Presiding over this year’s decision is none other than Roddy Doyle, the 1993 Booker Prize winner himself. He’s joined by a dream team of readers and storytellers:

This year’s shortlist of six novels has been chosen from a staggering 153 submissions, all works of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025. Each shortlisted author pockets £2,500 (₹2.6 lakh), a gorgeous specially bound edition of their book, and perhaps most exciting of all, global attention. The overall winner will take home £50,000 (₹52.5 lakh) and the world’s literary spotlight.

Hello, book lovers! We are counting down the hours to the Booker Prize 2025 winner announcement, happening live from London. The livestream kicks off on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube channel at 9.30pm GMT (3 am IST), and we will be here with you every step of the way, apprising you of the buzz, the nerves, the speeches, the glorious moment when one author’s name is read out. So stay tuned.