Booker Prize shortlist 2025: Six authors who spent 'decades honing their craft'

Kiran Desai’s epic novel of India and migration, 19 years in the writing, leads a Booker Prize shortlist which is long on established writers.

The finalists for the Booker, one of the world’s most watched literary prizes, were announced in London earlier Wednesday morning (NZ time), with the judges - including novelist Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City actress, publisher and bibliophile Sarah Jessica Parker - whittling down their long list of 13 to just six novels.

The favourite is Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which was published only yesterday. It follows two immigrants, a writer and a journalist, who return to India and meet on an overnight train.

The novel is Desai’s first in nearly two decades since she won the Booker Prize with her debut, The Inheritance of Loss. It has been among the most anticipated novels of 2025. If Desai wins, she would be the fifth writer to win the Booker twice, joining Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, J.M Coetzee and Peter Carey; her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted three times.

But this year’s shortlist has reversed some of the trends of recent years. That can happen because the judging panel changes every year, but this year has been a particularly stark shift. The judges have gone for established authors. Apart from Desai, each has written five or more novels. Out has been the drift of the last few Booker Prizes towards a shortlist of debuts and younger novelists.

It has caught some critics and even bookmakers by surprise. The bookies - there is a small but not insignificant betting line on the Booker - had installed Maria Reva’s debut, Endling, about a forager for endangered snails during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as one of the favourites, but it didn’t make the shortlist. Similarly, another favourite Seascraper by Benjamin Wood about a young man who is a “shanker” trawling for prawns in 1960s Britain, has not made the cut.

Instead in come Americans Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits and two previous shortlisters from Britain, Andrew Miller, and David Szalay, as well as Desai. (Szalay is originally from Hungary.)

Chief judge Roddy Doyle, who himself won a Booker for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993, told a London audience over night: “The authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written.”

The Chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood, homed in on the experience of the writers this year.

“It is striking that the writers on this year’s powerful shortlist have spent decades honing their craft. They are already much loved by readers and critics, writers of enormous commitment, curiosity, and skill.”

One of the books on the list which seems to divide readers is Szalay’s Flesh. His All That Man Is was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. It is the story of Istvan from his taciturn boyhood to his life as a taciturn soldier then lover and husband, before making a fortune in property deals in London, then losing the lot. The book is remarkable for saying a lot with few words. There are almost no interior thoughts. Istvan communicates with little more than “okay” or “yes”. The word “okay” appears 340 times. Yet, readers have found Istvan’s story still enthralling. Or hard to read depending on one’s taste.

The Booker prize, previously the Man Booker, is for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK. The scope means that novelists from around the world can be considered. It has one of the points of contention of the Booker that what used to a prize for mainly British and Irish writers now often has a good representation of American writers, and beyond.

This year’s American contingent is graced by Katie Kitamura whose Audition is an extraordinary experimental novel opening with two people meeting in a restaurant. Their narratives seem to joust as to whose view is right. RNZ reviewer Kiran Dass said it is as if the entire book is a performance.

Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives is his twelfth novel. It follows a professor who drives his daughter to college and then does not stop, heading off on an odyssey across the US.

Susan Choi's Flashlight is a historic novel on a large scale of the history of Japan, Korea and America but it is centred on an intimate family mystery; a girl Louisa Kang is found after a near-drowning, her father a Korean raised in Japan, has disappeared into the water holding a flashlight.

Finally, The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller is set in rural England during a particularly punishing winter in the 1960s. Booker judge Chris Power probably summed it up best when he wrote, “the two couples at the centre of the novel are as frozen as the landscape in which Miller places them, but huge changes are coming for them all.” It is a book where everything - cows, cars, the fog over the farm - can feel ominous. Miller was nominated for a Booker in 2001 for Oxygen.

Judge Sarah Jessica Parker said it was tough making the call to cull down to a final six novels. The judges used a traffic light system to rate the 153 books they had been given - using red, amber or green to pick where it should go ahead.

"I think it's real agony. There's nothing casual about letting a book go.

"I think we all had a couple of books that our heart was broken [to lose]."

The agony continues a little longer. The winner will be announced in London on 10 November.