The 2025 Booker Prize Longlist: Thirteen Novels, Infinite Worlds

The 2025 Booker Prize longlist has been revealed, and with it, a dazzling showcase of fiction that spans nine nationalities and four continents. This year’s selection, chosen from hundreds of submissions, affirms the prize’s continuing mission to recognise literature that is daring, inventive and deeply attuned to the human condition.

The longlist of 13 novels brings together both celebrated names and bold new voices. Among the most talked-about is Kiran Desai, making a remarkable return to the Booker nearly two decades after her 2006 win with The Inheritance of Loss. Her long-awaited novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, joins a field of books that explore themes as varied as migration, climate futures, technology, belonging and love.

The judging panel described the 2025 longlist as “a chorus of voices, each distinct yet resonant, offering a vision of literature that is both timely and timeless.”

This year’s list stands out for its global reach. Stories set in sprawling cities and remote villages, speculative futures and intimate domestic spaces, together form a map of contemporary storytelling. From the first page of each novel, readers encounter questions about identity, justice, memory and resilience — questions that transcend borders while remaining rooted in particular times and places.

For readers, the longlist announcement marks the beginning of the Booker journey. It is the first invitation to engage, to discover, and to debate. Some will find themselves drawn to the lyricism of one novel, others to the bold structure of another. Collectively, the longlist provides not only a reading list but also a reflection of the world we share.

The shortlist of six novels will be announced on 23 September 2025 at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and the winner will be revealed on 10 November 2025 at Old Billingsgate, in a ceremony broadcast worldwide.

Until then, the longlist offers a reminder of why the Booker Prize matters: it introduces readers everywhere to the stories shaping our present and imagining our future.