Inside This Year’s International Booker Prize Shortlist
This year’s shortlist cuts deep—with rage, grief, and a landmark win for Kannada literature
The International Booker Prize has never been about bestsellers or dinner party picks. It’s the award that reads in the shadows—across borders and often through translation. In 2025, the shortlist is different. It’s small in size, fierce in politics, and laser-focused on voices that have long been told to wait their turn.
Six books. Five novels, one short story collection. All published by independent presses. All politically urgent. All preoccupied with the complex choreography of survival—how we endure, resist, exist.
It’s also the most radical shortlist we’ve seen in years: five of the six books clock in under 200 pages, but don’t mistake brevity for softness. These are stories sharpened down to the bone. They deal with rage, grief, bureaucracy, and collapse. And in a major milestone for Indian literature, a book translated from Kannada—Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi—has landed on the list. It’s the first-ever Kannada work to be recognised by the prize, and only the second from an Indian language to make it to this global stage, after Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in 2022.
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This year, the Booker List is platforming voices that have, for decades, been highlighting what it means to endure.
The Booker page said in a statement earlier that the books are about survival and self-preservation and about our indomitable instinct to keep going in the face of catastrophe and hopelessness.
"In a world that can often seem full of despair, this is a shortlist that celebrates the human spirit—our capacity to endure and our impulse to live a better life," they said.
A Huge Win For Banu Mushtaq
In a shortlist stacked with global heavyweights and avant-garde voices, Heart Lamp arrives with a quiet, grounded intensity. It is a rare moment in literature when a regional voice—firmly rooted in place, language, and history—manages to transcend borders without losing its edge.
Banu Mushtaq’s twelve-story collection is a patient, persistent excavation of the lives of Muslim women and girls in southern India. Written over three decades (1990 to 2023), the stories are deceptively simple at first glance—domestic spaces, village routines, rites of passage. But what pulses beneath is the weight of social rot: caste, patriarchy, religious oppression, class silences. Mushtaq’s prose, in Bhasthi’s skilled translation, never veers into the sentimental. There is beauty here, yes—but it is often shadowed by struggle.
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For Mushtaq, the moment is as personal as it is historic—one she dedicated to her father, who enrolled her in a Kannada-medium school against all odds.
The International Booker Prize 2025 Shortlisted Books
On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
A woman wakes up every morning on the same day: November 18th. Time doesn’t move. No one else notices. And in the static terror of repetition, existential questions bloom. This is the first in a planned seven-part series, but even as a standalone, Balle’s philosophical sci-fi is haunting. It explores how identity and time are intertwined, and what it means to live when the world forgets to change.
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson
Written in just three weeks, this book is a response to a real tragedy: the 2021 capsizing of a boat carrying migrants from France to the UK. 27 lives were lost. Delecroix channels that grief into a morality tale that isn’t preachy—it’s piercing. Bureaucrats shrug responsibility; systems collapse under their own weight.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami
Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Soft Skull)
From the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes a novel-in-stories set in a future where extinction is imminent, and yet people continue to live, laugh, and search for connection. Kawakami’s world-building is surreal and strangely tender.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
Translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes (NYRB)
Hughes becomes the most shortlisted translator in Booker history with this sociologically sharp novel about a millennial couple in Berlin. What begins as a satire of hipsterdom slowly peels away to show deeper truths about alienation, aesthetics, and self-curation.
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre
Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson (New Directions)
Written after the suicide of her sister, this book is a mosaic of memories and fiction, mental illness and longing. The friendship at its centre is mysterious, painful, and tender.
“From the too-perfect interiors of a Berlin apartment to a terrifying journey across the English Channel; from patriarchal communities in southern India to a futuristic world at the limits of our imagination; the six shortlisted books place a huge variety of human experiences under the microscope,” the Booker Prize Foundation said in a statement announcing the shortlist.
“These are books about survival and self-preservation – about our indomitable instinct to keep going in the face of catastrophe, oppression, extinction, or hopelessness. In a world that can often seem full of despair, this is a shortlist that celebrates the human spirit – our capacity to endure and our impulse to live a better life,” it added.