International Booker Prize announces 2025 jury for $87K literary award for best fiction translated to English
The jury is chaired by writer English writer and editor Max Porter
The International Booker Prize has announced the jury for the 2025 prize.
English writer and editor Max Porter will chair the five-person jury. Porter will be joined by Nigerian-British writer, director and photographer Caleb Femi, Sana Goyal, editor and publishing director of Wasafiri literary magazine, Korean novelist and translator Anton Hur and English musician Beth Orton.
The annual award recognizes the best works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The £50,000 ($87,397.25 Cdn) grand prize is divided equally between writer and translator.
Porter is the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, which won the the Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Lanny, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and Shy, which he adapted as a screenplay that will be filmed by Netflix in 2024. He is a Royal Society of Literature fellow and was formerly the editorial director of Granta Books.
Femi is the writer of poetry collection Poor, which won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2021. He is also the director of TV episodes for HBO, the BBC and Netflix as well as films and runways for many high-fashion brands. He was the Young People's Laureate for London and was featured in the Dazed 100 list of people making waves in youth culture. His next book The Wickedest is forthcoming in September 2024.
Goyal is the current editor and publishing director of the literary magazine Wasafiri. Her book reviews are published in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review and Vogue India among other outlets. She judged the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Born in Stockholm and currently living in Seoul, Hur is the third translator in history to be longlisted twice for the International Booker Prize in the same year. In 2022, his translation of Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung and that of Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City made the longlist. He is also the writer of novels Toward Eternity and No One Told Me Not To. He has won both a PEN Translates grant and a PEN/Heim grant.
Orton is a singer-songwriter of seven solo albums, for which she has won a BRIT Award and been nominated for multiple Mercury Prizes. Her self-produced album Weather Alive was critically acclaimed and was on numerous best of the year lists, including that of The New York Times. She has toured around the world, headlining venues such as Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Glastonbury Festival and Carnegie Hall.
'"The judging panel of the International Booker Prize 2025 is made up of a novelist, a poet, a translator, a critic and a songwriter, all of whom cross boundaries into other art forms," said Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the International Booker Prize.
"In their various ways, they are steeped in the world of words. That deep expertise, along with their critical judgment as readers and writers, will be vitally important in the private reading and communal judging discussions that will be held over the coming months."
The panel will look for the best work of fiction translated to English published in the U.K. and Ireland between May 1, 2024 and Apr. 30, 2025. Authors of any nationality are eligible.
A longlist of 12 or 13 books will be announced in February 2025, with the shortlist of six books to follow in April. The winner will be revealed in May 2025.
Esteemed broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, who recently retired from hosting the CBC Radio show Writers & Company, chaired the International Booker Prize jury last year. The 2024 winner was German author Jenny Erpenbeck for Kairos, the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany's existence.
