The International Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist has been announced with thirteen longlisted titles of fiction translated into English, whittled down to six.
The shortlist is as follows:
- A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (translated by Mark Hutchison)
- Heat Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (translated by Deepa Bhasthi)
- Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (translated by Sophie Hughes)
- Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromo Kawakami (translated by Asa Yoneda)
- Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (translated by Helen Stevenson)
- On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J Haveland)
"Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.
"This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows into a world, but they are all gorgeously universal."
The prize awards £25,000 to the author and £25,000 to the translator, in recognition of the essential work of translators in bringing fiction to a wider audience.
The winner will be announced on 20 May 2025.