This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.
The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades
Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career.
Go to this page, helpfully titled, "Everything you need to know about the Booker Prize 2025 longlist." The page itself if a gold mine of a resource to help readers. It had details about every book, information about the judges. And on the prize's main page, there are even more articles about this year's longlist. I will also post them at the bottom of this post.
But even with the regular. display, backlist, and collection development advice I give for every award (access above), The Book Prize is an award you need to know about for a variety of reasons, reasons which give you even more options to serve your patrons.
First, these books are always among the top books written in English every year, which means this year and past year's lists make for reliable suggestions to your curious readers. The backlist is also very easy to access in two different ways. The first is a page here where you can use drop down menus to do so deep dive searching and/or scroll under those drop downs to see the announcements for each year in reverse chronological order. The second is a page here with a list of each year (reverse chronological order) of every title beginning with the winner and then listing all of the longlist titles and the titles are linked to get even more information about them.
Second, these titles (2025 or any year in the recent past) tend to be on the "readable side." What do I mean with that? What I mean is that they tend to pick excellent titles of high literary merit that are readable for a general adult audience. These are critically acclaimed, literary fiction titles that you can give out to a wide swath of readers with confidence.
Third, the Booker Prize has a history of identifying authors worth you time early in their careers, sometimes earlier than they get singled out for other major awards. These are authors worth having on yourself and suggesting, but you (and your readers) may not have them on their radar yet. Take this comment from the judges this year:
Kiran Desai is the only previous Booker winner on this year’s longlist, following her 2006triumph with The Inheritance of Loss. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is Desai’s first novel since her Booker win 19 years ago. Should she win this year, she would become only the fifth double winner in the prize’s 56-year history. Her mother, Anita Desai, was shortlisted for the Booker three times.
Tash Aw, who joins a select group of 24 writers who have been nominated for the Booker three times (he was also longlisted in 2005 and 2013), is bidding to become the prize’s first Malaysian winner. He is one of two Malaysian novelists to be nominated for the Booker Prize in its history, the other being Tan Twan Eng (another three-time nominee).
Two other writers on this year’s list have been nominated for the Booker before (making four in total): Andrew Miller was shortlisted in 2001 for Oxygen, while David Szalay was shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is.
Nine of the authors (Claire Adam, Natasha Brown, Jonathan Buckley, Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura, Ben Markovits, Maria Reva, Benjamin Wood and Ledia Xhoga) are longlisted for the Booker for the first time, but all 13 longlistees have literary awards to their names.
Fourth, this award list serves as a readalike for itself. Not all awards can do this, but I have used this award list as a suggestion engine for readers who have enjoyed any book that has appeared on the longlists. In fact, back in the early days of the 2000s, I offered a "Holds Without Hassle" program at my library, and not only did we allow them to pick authors for that list, but we also had a few awards they could select. This award (called the Man Booked back in the day) was one of the most popular choices. People wanted the winner put on automatic hold and then after reading it, we helped them find the other nominated titles. I have seen this work in action, even with the books being about widely different topics and from a range of authors.
Fifth, and this is how my readers first found out about this award in the first place, these titles make excellent book discussion choices. There is a very helpful Booker Library, where you can find books by author, title, or even pick a prize year. And to make it even easier for you, they have Reading Guides designed specifically for libraries. Using the backlist from 2-5 years ago is a great resource for winning discussion titles.
And finally, the judges. I have talked about this before, but look at that list of judges from this year or past years. (Click on the post for each year on that page and scroll down to read about the judges.) Take this year for example-- click here and scroll down. The judges themselves are excellent options for displays, suggestions, and purchase if you don't own their books. You can also use the judges list as one of my 5 Resources You Cannot Live Without-- Author Recs of Other Authors. Last year, I wrote about how that works in relation to the NYT Best Books of the Century discussion.
I am sure there are even more reasons why this award is a great resource for you to help your readers. Click through for all of the details and information and decide how you can best use this list for your library. The site is really a treasure trove of resources, suggestions, and lists all year long.
I will end this post with the most basic info-- the titles on the long list and the summary by the jurors about the list as a whole. All from this page:
Longlist The 13 nominated books are:
- Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber)
- The South by Tash Aw (4th Estate)
- Universality by Natasha Brown (Faber)
- One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape)
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
- Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press)
- The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber)
- The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)
- Endling by Maria Reva (Virago/Little, Brown)
- Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)
- Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)
- Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals)
The longlist features authors representing four continents and nine countries: Albania, Canada, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, the UK and USA.
It features two debut novels – Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation and Maria Reva’s Endling. Six debut novels have won the Booker in its 56-year history, the most recent being Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain.The nominated novels encapsulate a vast range of international experiences. Arguably more than any other year in the prize’s history, this year’s longlist boasts a truly global outlook.
The longlisted books 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 whose child was 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.
There’s a novel that began life as a short story in the New Yorker, one that was almost 20 years in the making and another that’s the first book in a proposed quartet. There are books that explore modern masculinity in its many forms, the intense bonds between mothers and children, and the multiple ways in which country, class, race and history shape people’s lives.
There are books here that are playful and expansive, sweeping and intimate; that stir up long-held secrets, painful memories and unsolved mysteries; that present us with characters on a journey to escape or confront their pasts, or performing roles they have created or that have been foisted upon them. There are books that are quietly devastating and darkly comic; that provide powerful meditations on love, guilt and responsibility; and that cast a satirical eye on the media and identity politics.
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