The Booker shortlist honors authors ‘in total command’ of their craft

The 2025 Booker shortlist is made up of works by veteran authors, most of whom have more than five books to their name. In a statement, author Roddy Doyle, the chair of judges, writes that the shortlisters are “in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise.”

Each of the six shortlisted authors receives £2,500 ($3,380) and “a specially bound edition of their book.” The Booker Prize winner will be announced Monday, Nov. 10, in a ceremony that will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ social channels. The winner will receive £50,000 ($67,600).

This year’s Booker Shortlist winners are:

Flashlight by Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s sixth novel began as a short story published in The New Yorker.  Inspired by her own experiences growing up in the midwest as the daughter of a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother, Choi told NPR Flashlight “kind of wrote itself like a snail shell. It just kept spiraling outward in both directions.”

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. She spent almost 20 years writing The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel about Indians in America that the Booker Prize judges hailed as “a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story.”

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Kitamura told NPR she got the idea for Audition from a headline that read “A stranger told me he was my son.” She said she” was completely captivated by the idea that in a single encounter, in a single moment, everything you understand about yourself and your place in the world could be overturned.” A live-action movie adaptation of Audition will star Lucy Liu and Charles Melton.

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits

Former professional basketball player Ben Markovits’ novel is described by the Booker judges as a “remarkably satisfying road trip full of strangers, friends, and self-discovery.” Markovits said in a statement, “My kids were getting older and I wanted to write something about a certain period of family life coming to an end.”

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

This is Andrew Miller’s 10th novel and his second to make the Booker shortlist (Oxygen made the list in 2001). The book tells the story of two young couples during the U.K.’s Big Freeze of 1962-63; The Guardian wrote that Miller “turns to the difficulty of loving in an unlovely world.”

Flesh by David Szalay

Szalay’s second novel to make the Booker shortlist (the first was All That Man Is in 2016) is set in Hungary and follows the young man István from his teen years into adulthood. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it, Szalay’s new novel reads a bit like an immigrant bildungsroman flavored with Albert Camus,” writes Colin Dwyer for NPR.