‘Mind-expanding’: Six books shortlisted for International Booker Prize
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The six titles shortlisted to compete for International Booker Prize 2025.
PHOTO: THE BOOKER PRIZES/FACEBOOK
Alex Marshall
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LONDON – A satire of expatriate life in trendy Berlin, a tale of an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a time loop, and a fictionalised retelling of a migrant boat tragedy in the English Channel are among the six titles that will compete for International Booker Prize 2025, the award’s organisers announced on April 8.
Perhaps the highest profile title on the shortlist for the prize for fiction translated into English is Danish writer Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation Of Volume: 1, about a bookseller who relives the same day over and over again.
Balle’s novel, translated from Danish by Scottish literary translator Barbara J. Haveland, was a nominee for the United States’ National Book Award 2024 for translated literature. Many critics have raved about it since its release in 2024.
In a review for The New York Times, American writer Hilary Leichter said that “the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions” in Balle’s hands.
The six shortlisted titles – four of which are under 200 pages – also include Italian author Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, translated from Italian by British literary translator Sophie Hughes. It is about an expatriate couple living in a hip Berlin neighbourhood and struggling to engage with life outside their bubble.
Writer Ryan Ruby, in a review for the Times, said that “with ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomises the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads”.
Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally given to an author for their life’s work, but since 2016 has been awarded to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It comes with prize money of £50,000 (S$86,200) which the winning author and translator share equally.
The award in 2024 went to German writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos translated by German-born translator Michael Hofmann. Previous winners include Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter in 2023 and South Korean writer Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in 2016.
English author Max Porter, the chair of the judging panel in 2025, said in a news release that the “mind-expanding” shortlist was “a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity”.
The books “don’t shut down debate, they generate it”, he added.
Along with Balle’s and Latronico’s novels, the other shortlisted titles are:
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson: A fictionalised retelling of the 2021 sinking of a migrant boat that capsized on the journey from France to Britain, leading to 27 deaths.
Under The Eye Of The Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda: A series of interconnected stories set in a dystopian future, where the only remaining humans are produced in factories.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada (a language spoken in southern India) by Deepa Bhasthi: A collection of short stories about Muslim women in India and dealing with family and community tensions.
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson: A novel about the relationship between an unnamed narrator and an anguished friend. Serre told the Booker Prize’s website that she wrote the novel in a few months after the suicide of her sister. “I wanted to create a memorial to her, one that was as beautiful as possible,” Serre said.
The judges will announce a winner on May 20 during a ceremony at art gallery Tate Modern in London. NYTIMES
