The Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist Readings
Meet the six authors up for this year’s Booker Prize, as they read from and discuss their shortlisted books with novelist Sara Collins.
The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.
On the eve of the Booker Prize ceremony, hear from the six shortlisted authors in the running for this year’s £50,000 prize at this popular annual event.
Featuring both classical storytelling and novels that push the boundaries of narrative form, this year’s shortlist explores the ties that bind families together – and the moments of crisis that can pull them apart.
Roddy Doyle, Chair of the Booker Prize 2025 judges, said: ‘All of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people.’
This year’s shortlist includes:
Audition by Katie Kitamura, published by Fern Press
Flashlight by Susan Choi, published by Jonathan Cape
Flesh by David Szalay, published by Jonathan Cape
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, published by Sceptre
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, published by Hamish Hamilton
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, published by Faber & Faber
Sara Collins was a Booker Prize judge in 2024. She is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019. She is also a literary critic, screenwriter, broadcaster and podcaster.
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