The Best Fiction Books: The 2025 International Booker Prize

Thank you for joining us to discuss the 2025 International Booker Prize shortlist: five novels and a short story collection. The judges for the International Booker must get an incredible sense of current fiction output all around the world. Were there any patterns or trends in the submissions that surprised you?

Oh, yes. Lots. Beth [Orton] was the judge who had the best eye for this, but if I were to take a stab at it myself, the theme that stood out for me was the many ruminations of what it means to be human in our current era, as there is so much dehumanising going on in both the UK and around the world, with migrants dying in transit, multiple genocides, the environment collapsing, the ravages of Covid-19, and other global events that affect all of us.

And I must say that the least surprising thing was the plethora of fantastic translations by a plethora of fantastic translators.

How many books did you read, and what were you looking for?

We read 154 books. I think, at the end of the day, we were looking for something that really gripped us and wouldn’t let go—the kind of book that would survive such an intense onslaught of full-length books.

What stood out would stand out for different reasons, so I can’t really put a finger on what we were looking for, per se. It was more of an, “I know it when I see it” situation. When there are this many books, I can’t imagine having super-specific criteria.

I think, in the end, our longlist came to be exemplified by the really excellent language that showed us something we had never seen before or never seen done so well.

The first book on the shortlist is the first book from Solvej Balle’s extraordinary time-loop septology On the Calculation of Volume. It has been translated from the original Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. For those who haven’t heard about this book, could you offer them a précis?

This is a tricky book to summarise. Basically, an antique book dealer finds herself trapped within a single repeating day and she slowly figures out what she can take from each repeating day and what she cannot. It is a very quiet book that conveys an intense sense of time being lived.

What do the judges admire about it?

I think what we ultimately love about this book is how different it feels from the way we tend to live life now, going about our day with our senses deadened and our fingers scrolling through social media feeds, completely in denial of time as it passes. The whole book is a real antidote to the toxic warping of our sense of time and space.

Interesting. Next on the 2025 International Booker Prize shortlist we have Small Boat by the French author Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson. It’s based on a real-life tragedy that unfolded in the English Channel. Please tell us more.

This is a novel that is written from the perspective of a rescue boat dispatcher who fails to dispatch a rescue team for a group of migrants who subsequently sink to their deaths. This book will hopefully disturb you and make you question why you feel so disturbed. It is a short book that is nevertheless full of horror and rage and guilt.

Do you see the role of the International Booker Prize as flagging up books of social or political value, as well as purely literary?

As a translator, I am constantly being asked if I sacrifice accuracy for aesthetics or vice versa, and my answer always is that this is a false binary. You cannot separate social or political value from literary value. You cannot divorce a text from the context in which it exists, as language exists within a culture, and literature is made of language.

Too many people regard translation as the separation of a text from its source culture when it is just as much the integration of a text into a new context.

Our next shortlisted book is the novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the original Japanese by Asa Yoneda. What can readers expect?

The unexpected! This book is about nothing less than the very future of humanity. It is a feat of the imagination and a great translation.

There is just so much anxiety in our post-pandemic world. We had to get used to thinking of ourselves as not just communities or nations but as an entire species. But will we ever manage to do so, really? This novel is about the end of humanity as we know it. But it is full of hope, at the same time.

Do you think speculative fiction has a special power in exploring contemporary anxieties?

Absolutely. Think about how many readers were terrified by the opening of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Think about how we still use terms invented by George Orwell in his Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some of the best writers in English—like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan–have shifted to writing speculative fiction. Because the unimaginable and the unprecedented keeps happening, we keep turning to the speculative.

Next on the shortlist we have Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, as translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes. It’s made quite a splash for skewering the contemporary ‘millennial‘ lifestyle. Would you introduce us?

Yes, it is indeed a skewering of the contemporary millennial lifestyle as it pertains to digital nomads in the gig economy—they’re even front-end engineers, the ‘superficial layer’ of tech—but I really hope that when people read this very entertaining novel that they also take note of the sharp critiques of privilege throughout, like that indelible description of that world-infamous image of the drowned Syrian child on the beach.

It, like most of the books on the 2025 International Booker Prize shortlist, is a very slim volume at around 100 pages. Is that something you noticed among submissions more generally?

The funny thing was that none of the judges noticed the lengths of the books we chose for the longlist until we saw them all together.

Slim books are very common in East Asia, so I thought nothing of it, but I guess I do now see that publishers in the Anglosphere are more willing to embrace shorter-length works of prose? Welcome to the club!

The fifth book on the shortlist—and the 2025 winner of the International Booker Prize—is Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the south Indian language Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi. It’s the first time a set of short stories has won—what sets it apart?

Oh, many things. But I have got to say that for me it was the translation—so daring and textured and vitalic. The stories also, for a book that has the word “heart” in the title, kept breaking mine. The way these women keep colliding with both tradition and modernity is so acutely observed. Anyone—of any gender or age or country—can’t help but relate to their struggles between past and present. We’re all doing that.

Was it difficult to weigh the value of story collections against novels?

It depends on the collection for me. Some are very uneven, but for Heart Lamp, I loved every story and read in anticipation of each ‘turn’ in the plot, the emotional hinge in which the story, and the reader, transforms.

Short stories in translation do tend to rely on their translators even more than novels do, because every word counts about ten times more.

Finally we come to A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from the original French by Mark Hutchinson. It’s a novel that portrays an intense friendship with a woman who experiences mental illness. Why is it shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize?

I think this book in particular, while surely a fine work of literature in the original French, really takes on something extra in translation. It is a work of great empathy and, therefore, love, a careful attempt by a narrator who is trying to understand a friend who is inaccessible to him, as we are all ultimately inaccessible to each other. But he tries anyway.

And the fact that there’s an extra narrative layer to filter through—the translator—makes the conceit hit home even harder.

Thank you for the whistle-stop tour. How did you approach the final stage of the judging?

With great trepidation! On the one hand, I knew we had such a great shortlist that it seems impossible to pick a bad winner. On the other hand—and this would sound terribly pretentious coming from anyone who isn’t a professional literary translator, but hear me out—the question of who wins the International Booker Prize has real historical consequences for our field at large. Either way, I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life celebrating our longlist cohort.