Image: Booker Prize Foundation, Yuki Sugiura
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Thirteen Books Translated from 10 Languages
The 13-title 2025 longlist being released this afternoon in London (February 25) includes an interesting first—a 43-year-old book first published in Dutch, marking the “longest gap between an original-language publication and International Booker Prize longlisting.”
As our world readership knows, this is not the better-known Booker Prize for Fiction, but its sister honor focused on translated work and established in 2005. It was adjusted from a biennial prize to an annual one a decade later, with the stipulation that entries must be written in a non-English language and translated into English and published, in this cycle, between October 1, 2024, and September 30 of this year in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
A win pays £50,000 (US$63,275), which is divided between the winning author and translator (or translators where a book has more than one). A six-book shortlist is anticipated for April 8, and each of those shortlisted titles is to be given £5,000 (US$6,332). An event announcing the 2025 winner of the International Booker Prize is to be live-streamed on May 20 from London’s Tate Modern, which toasts its own 25th anniversary this year.
Not enough time to read? The program points out the relative brevity in many of its longlisted titles this year. Of the initial pool of 154 submissions from publishers—a record for the current annual format inaugurated in 2016:
- Eleven longlisted titles come to fewer than 250 pages
- Eight are fewer than 200 pages
- The shortest is 97 pages
- One is 657 pages
Twelve of 13 Titles Published by Independent Publishers
This “Booker’s dozen” longlist’s authors and translators represent 15 nationalities on five continents, with Romanian and Surinamese-Dutch writers and an Iraqi translator featured for the first time. These are books translated from 10 languages. They include Romanian, and—for the first time—Kannada, classically known as Canarese and spoken by some 38 million people primarily in the southwestern Indian state Karnataka.
“As we searched for our longlist, we marveled at what the world was thinking. How are people making sense of these times, using the novel as a vehicle for thought and feeling?”Max Porter, International Booker jury chair 2025
And it’s springtime for independent publishers: This time, 11 independent houses have produced 12 of the 13 titles on the list. That’s another record on a longlist from this prize. All 13 authors are making their debut with the International Booker Prize, three of them with their own first publications, eight with their first English-language releases.
There are three previously longlisted translators here, one nominated for a fifth time: a record. Our most astute readers will know that this is Sophie Hughes—and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is her first translation from Italian, as she generally works from Spanish. She has been shortlisted twice: in 2019 for The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán and in 2020 for Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, the author of This Is Not Miami.
This year’s jury comprises author Max Porter, acting as chair; poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and publishing director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and singer-songwriter Beth Orton.
Market Impact of the International Booker Prize
You’ll find more impact information on the Booker Prize Foundation’s broader work below. Here, in a gratifying look at this translation-boosting award are some statistics offered on the International Booker.
British edition, Granta Books
The prize apparently has helped to drive consumer-interest surge in translated fiction in the United Kingdom, organizers say, with print sales in 2023 reaching a record £26 million (US$32.9 million), which is up by 12 percent over 2022 according to Nielsen BookData.
The Booker Prize Foundation says that younger readers are the driving consumers here, “with almost half of translated fiction in the UK” bought by consumers younger than 35 years. “The prize’s influence also extends to other awards,” the program tells journalists,” with five authors recognized by the International Booker Prize going on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The announcement of the 2024 International Booker Prize-winner, Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann,” and published in the UK by Granta Books, “was reported in more than 2,500 news articles around the world.”
According to Granta, per the foundation, sales of the paperback edition of Kairos increased by 442 percent in the week after it won the International Booker Prize and it outperformed all previous winners for the first month after its win.
German edition, Penguin Verlag
The Booker Prize Foundation goes on to report that prior to the news of its win in May 2024, it had sold 10,000 copies across all editions. Since then, it has sold more than 80,000 copies. Granta Books has sold 30,000 of these copies through UK retailers, a 17-percent increase in sales over the 2023 winner in the same period.
Before being longlisted, Kairos’ translation rights had been sold to 16 territories. That figure now has doubled, rights being sold into 32 territories.
In Germany, Erpenbeck and Hofmann’s home market, the original edition of Kairos sold out at many booksellers on the day after the book’s Booker win, propelling the title to the Top 20 of Germany’s bestseller lists in all editions and reaching No. 1 in paperback for the first time since publication.
The book’s German publisher, Penguin Verlag, reports that before it had won the International Booker Prize in May 2024, Kairos had sold some 50,000 copies across all editions since its publication in 2021.
In June 2024, the month after its win, the book sold more than 90,000 copies in German. It has now sold more than 230,000 copies.
As mentioned, more impact statistics relative to the Booker Prize Foundation are below.
The 2025 International Booker Prize Longlist
| Title | Original Language | Author | Author Nationality | Translator(s) | Translator Nationality | UK Publisher/Imprint |
| The Book of Disappearance | Arabic | Ibtisam Azem | Palestinian | Sinan Antoon | Iraqi | And Other Stories |
| On the Calculation of Volume 1 | Danish | Solvej Balle | Danish | Barbara J Haveland | Scottish | Faber & Faber |
| There’s a Monster Behind the Door | French | Gaëlle Bélem | French, the island of La Réunion | Karen Fleetwood; Laëtitia Saint-Loubert | British; French | Bullaun Press |
| Solenoid | Romanian | Mircea Cărtărescu | Romanian | Sean Cotter | American | Pushkin Press |
| Reservoir Bitches | Spanish | Dahlia de la Cerda | Mexican | Julia Sanches; Heather Cleary | Brazilian; American | Scribe UK |
| Small Boat | French | Vincent Delacroix | French | Helen Stevenson | British | Small Axes |
| Hunchback | Japanese | Saou Ichikawa | Japanese | Polly Barton | British | Penguin Random House UK |
| Under the Eye of the Big Bird | Japanese | Hiromi Kawakami | Japanese | Asa Yoneda | Japanese | Granta Books |
| Eurotrash | German | Christian Kracht | Swiss | Daniel Bowles | American | Serpent’s Tail |
| Perfection | Italian | Vincenzo Latronico | Italian | Sophie Hughes | British | Fitzcarraldo Editions |
| Heart Lamp | Kannada | Banu Mushtaq | Indian | Deepa Bhasthi | Indian | And Other Stories |
| On a Woman’s Madness | Dutch | Astrid Roemer | Surinamese-Dutch | Lucy Scott | American | Tilted Axis Press |
| A Leopard-Skin Hat | French | Anne Serre | French | Mark Hutchinson | British | Lolli Editions |
Comments on the Longlist
In a statement of rationale on behalf of the jury, chair Max Porter is quoted, saying in part, “Translated fiction is not an elite or rarefied cultural space requiring expert knowledge; it’s the exact opposite. It’s stories of every conceivable kind from everywhere, for everyone. It is a miraculous way in which we might meet one another in all our strangeness and sameness, and defy the borders erected between us.
Max Porter
“As we searched for our longlist, we marveled at what the world was thinking. How are people making sense of these times, using the novel as a vehicle for thought and feeling? And how are translators taking these books and—in English—making them sing or scream? The books on our unconventional longlist provide a wildly energizing and surprising range of answers. We hope they’ll exhilarate and engage a worldwide community of readers. …
“As a group of judges, we’ve been amazed at how differently we read, and we’ve come to adore that difference.”
Fiametta Rocco
Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the prize, says that this year’s jurors “bring richly varied perspectives to their reading and over the last six months have come together under Max’s charismatic leadership to produce a list that’s all the more vital for having been created collectively. …
“Throughout, the impact that all these books have had on the judging panel is testament to the care and effort that goes into bringing them to the attention of English-language readers.”
The Booker Prize Foundation’s Impact
Much has been written here at Publishing Perspectives about the need for book award programs—which are remarkably numerous in Britain—to offer insight into the market impact their honors can carry.
Without such input, little is actually known about how much a “golden sticker” can do to sell a book. Here are two reasons why this is important:
- Publishers’ investments in submissions, and
- The near-constant promotion of myriad prizes—how much does this contribute to commercial coherence for consumers?
For years, the Booker Prize Foundation has led the way with periodic updates on the market performance of various winning titles from its two industry-leading accolades. And this has begun to prompt several other programs to look at doing this.
Since Publishing Perspectives began reporting on this, the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction have begun developing statistics and reports on their own accolades’ market impact. We’ve also had word that the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is planning to report on this from its influential National Translation Awards.
Today’s news of the International Booker Prize longlist comes with a summation of the Booker Prize Foundation’s (both prizes) impact track record. Even a glance at these numbers make it clear why the two stickers offered by this awards regime are understood as golden.
Quoting from the foundation, this set of statistics includes a note on the book-to-screen development track record of Booker-honored titles:
- “Since 1969, 23 countries have been represented by winners of the prizes, 74 by nominated authors
- “Fifty percent of 21st-century Nobel Prize in Literature winners were rewarded by the Booker prizes first
- “Seventy-seven Booker-nominated books have been adapted for film and television
- “The Booker’s have been mentioned in international media more than 75,000 times in the past year
- “The Booker prizes worked with more than 1,000 UK libraries and more than 380 UK and Irish bookshops in 2024
- “Fourteen University of East Anglia scholars have been supported by the Booker Prize Foundation since 2009
- “Some 800,000 people in prison have been given access to Booker titles through the Books Unlocked program since 2012
- “A total 15,000 Booker books have been loaned from the Royal National Institute of Blind People library since 2016”
The International Booker Prize is themed ‘A Feast of Fiction From Around the World’ as its promotional slogan for the 2025 competition, reflected in the table settings here. Image: Booker Prize Foundation, Yuki Sugiura
Also today from London: ‘The Great Copyright Heist Cannot Go Unchallenged’
More from Publishing Perspectives on both Booker Prize programs is here. More on the International Booker Prize is here, more on translation is here, and more from us on international publishing and book awards programs in general is here.
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