Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai makes it to the longlist again!
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London/New Delhi: Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai on Tuesday returned to the coveted literary award longlist with ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny', a novel described by the judges as a “vast and immersive” tale about a pair of young Indians in America, PTI reported.
The 53-year-old Delhi-born author, who won the Booker Prize 19 years ago in 2006 with ‘The Inheritance of Loss', joins 12 writers from around the world for the so-called “Booker Dozen” of 13 books that will be whittled down to six shortlisted titles by September.
Desai's latest novel stands out as the longest on the longlist, weighing in at 667 pages and published by Hamish Hamilton. The shortest is "Universality" by Natasha Brown at 156 pages.
"She has spent almost 20 years writing ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny'. Should she win this year, she would become the fifth double winner in the prize's 56-year history,” Booker Prize Foundation said in a statement.
“Desai has a family history with the prize: her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted for the Booker three times,” it noted.
The 2025 prize longlist was chosen from 153 submissions, celebrating the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
Other works in the race to be shortlisted include Trinidadian author Claire Adam's ‘Love Forms', Malaysian Tash Aw's ‘The South', Canadian-Ukrainian Maria Reva's ‘Ending', Hungarian-British David Szalay's ‘Flesh' and Albanian-American Ledia Xhoga's ‘Misinterpretation'.
Four British authors in the running are: Natasha Brown with ‘Universality', Jonathan Buckley with ‘One Boat', Andrew Miller with ‘The Land in Winter' and Benjamin Wood with ‘Seascraper'. The three American authors who completed the longlist included Susan Choi in Flashlight, Katie Kitamura in Audition, and Ben Markovits in The Rest of Our Lives.
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 September 23.
The winning book for 2025 will be announced on November 10 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, with the winner receiving GBP 50,000 (approx Rs 58 lakh). The six shortlisted authors will each receive GBP 2,500 (approx Rs 2.90 lakh) and a specially bound edition of their book.
