Kiran Desai, Susan Choi, Andrew Miller And Three Others Make Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist

Nearly two decades after winning the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, acclaimed Indian author Kiran Desai has once again found her name on the prestigious shortlist.

Her latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, took almost 20 years to complete and is already being celebrated as one of the standout works of the 2025 Booker Prize competition.

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The Booker Prize, one of the world’s most recognised literary honours, annually celebrates outstanding fiction written in English. The six shortlisted authors for 2025, announced on September 23, include a blend of celebrated veterans and highly regarded contemporary voices.

Each recipient receives £2,500 (approximately $3,380) and a specially bound edition of their book, while the winner, to be revealed on November 10, 2025, will take home £50,000 ($67,600). The ceremony will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and livestreamed across the Booker’s official platforms.

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For Kiran Desai, this moment marks a profound return to the Booker stage. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sweeping novel about Indians in America, layered with magical realism, romance, and social commentary. Judges praised it as “a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story,” highlighting its emotional depth and innovative storytelling.

While Kiran  Desai’s return has drawn wide attention, the 2025 shortlist is filled with equally striking works by other established authors, all of whom are considered to be in complete command of their craft.

• Susan Choi – Flashlight
  Choi, whose sixth novel began as a short story in The New Yorker, offers a work inspired by her upbringing as the daughter of a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother. She describes Flashlight as a story that “wrote itself like a snail shell,” spiralling outward in unexpected ways.

• Katie Kitamura – Audition
  Kitamura drew inspiration from a striking headline—“A stranger told me he was my son.” Her novel explores how a single encounter can overturn one’s entire sense of identity and belonging. Audition has already been snapped up for a live-action film adaptation starring Lucy Liu and Charles Melton.

• Ben Markovits – The Rest of Our Lives
  A former professional basketball player, Markovits captures the essence of a family transitioning through different stages of life. Judges called his work a “remarkably satisfying road trip full of strangers, friends, and self-discovery,” highlighting its warm, reflective tone.

• Andrew Miller – The Land in Winter
  Shortlisted once before in 2001 for Oxygen, Miller now returns with his 10th novel. The Land in Winter follows two young couples against the backdrop of the U.K.’s brutal Big Freeze of 1962–63. The book has been described as a meditation on the difficulty of love in an unforgiving world.

• David Szalay – Flesh
  Szalay, who made the 2016 shortlist with All That Man Is, sets his latest novel in Hungary, following István from youth into adulthood. Critics note its restrained prose but deep resonance, calling it “an immigrant bildungsroman flavoured with Albert Camus.”

Booker Prize chair of judges Roddy Doyle summed up this year’s selection by noting that every shortlisted author is “in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise.”