Sceptre Posts

The Booker Prize 2025 longlist

29 07 , 2025 No Comments

The full Booker Prize 2025 longlist, including author nationality, is:

– Love Forms (Faber) by Claire Adam (Trinidadian)

– The South (4th Estate) by Tash Aw (Malaysian)

– Universality (Faber) by Natasha Brown (British)

– One Boat (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Jonathan Buckley (British)

– Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi (American)

– The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton) by Kiran Desai (Indian)

– Audition (Fern Press) by Katie Kitamura (American)

– The Rest of Our Lives (Faber) by Ben Markovits (American)

– The Land in Winter (Sceptre) by Andrew Miller (British)

– Endling (Virago) by Maria Reva (Canadian-Ukrainian)

– Flesh (Jonathan Cape) by David Szalay (Hungarian-British)

– Seascraper (Viking) by Benjamin Wood (British)

– Misinterpretation (Daunt Books Originals) by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian-American)

Discover the full list: https://thebookerprizes.com/bp2025

The longlist has been selected by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. 

Doyle, who is the first Booker Prize winner to chair the panel, is joined by Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid. 

This year’s selection, which was chosen from 153 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.

For the first time, the shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event, to be held at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on Tuesday, 23 September 2025. The six shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The announcement of the winning book  will take place on Monday, 10 November 2025 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The announcement will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels. The winner receives £50,000.

The ‘Booker Dozen’ features five British authors, while also encapsulating a vast range of global experiences. The 13 novels transport readers to a farm in southern Malaysia, a Hungarian housing estate and a small coastal town in Greece. They shine a light on the lives of Koreans in postcolonial Japan, a homesick Indian in snowy Vermont, a Kosovar torture survivor living in New York, a shrimp fisherman in the north of England, a mother’s search for a child given up for adoption in Venezuela and even endangered snails in contemporary Ukraine. They reimagine the great American road trip as a slow-burning mid-life crisis and take us into the heart of the UK’s coldest winter. 

The judges’ selection features: 

  • Authors representing nine nationalities across four continents, with UK authors securing the highest number of nominations  
  • Kiran Desai, who is nominated 19 years after her previous book won the Booker Prize 
  • Tash Aw, longlisted for a third time, who could become the first Malaysian winner 
  • Past shortlistees Andrew Miller and David Szalay  
  • Two debut novelists among nine authors who appear on the Booker Prize longlist for the first time 
  • The first novel from an opera librettist and the 12th from a former professional basketball player 
  • A book that first garnered acclaim as a short story, and one that is the first in a proposed quartet 
  • Three titles from independent publisher Faber and a first Booker longlisting for Fitzcarraldo Editions, to add to its 16 International Booker Prize nominations  
  • Novels that are ‘alive with great characters and narrative surprises’ which ‘examine the past and poke at our shaky present’, according to Roddy Doyle, Chair of the 2025 judges  

This is a fabulous longlist with so much to discover. I am truly delighted at the coincidence that last week I had interviewed Andrew Miller on his fabulous book The Land in Winter for TOI Bookmark.

29 July 2025

“The Land in Winter” by Andrew Miller

21 07 , 2025 No Comments

Andrew Miller’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award in 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm’s Song and The Land in Winter, which won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2025. Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

The Land in Winter is a fabulous historical novel set in the extraordinary winter of 1962. The snowfall/blizzard began on Boxing Day 1962 and continued till March 1963. It was an unusual time where people were caught unawares, trapped indoors, with few rations. After a few days, even if the snow ploughs had helped clear roads, people were unsure if the grocery stores would be stocked. Supplies were erratic.

This novel centres around two young couples — Dr Eric and Irene Parry and Bill and Reeta Simmons. They are neighbours and outsiders to the village. Dr Parry is a GP and Bill Simmons is trying his hand at farming. Both the young wives are pregnant. The Land in Winter is about the lives of these four individuals, their intersections as well as their relationship with the other villagers in the local community.

There is a slow and deliberate build up to the story. But once the snow fall begins, the chapters are shorter, with the people trapped indoors and learning to live with each other. Given that the opening pages highlight some of the differences that were creeping into their marital relationships, the blizzard had proven to be (initially) a good thing. Over time, there are revelations that put their plans for a stable and content future as a young family asunder.

Andrew Miller specialises in historical fiction. Always has written in this genre. Ever since he chose writing as his profession at the age of eighteen. He has been fortunate to have won innumerable prestigious prizes. His research and eye for historical details to make the novel sound authentic in terms of the period it is set in, is meticulous. It is rewarding for the reader as it makes for a rich narrative. He makes multiple drafts and rewrites his texts, or portions thereof, as many times as is required. As a result, the sentences that he writes are exquisite. At times, even if the reworking has not improved the text, he discards it. Tough but essential. It is illuminating, liberating and rewarding because the text becomes clearer. It is a hard task to undertake and never gets any easier with every book that he writes but it helps get closer and closer to the truth he seeks in every story. There is immense variety in the kind of historical fiction that he writes.

Frankly, the two literary prizes that this book has collected so far in 2025 are well worth it!

Read The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller. It is published by Sceptre/ Hachette India.

21 July 2025

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