International Booker prize 2025: six experts review the shortlisted novels

By Helen Vassallo, Associate Professor of French and Translation, University of Exeter
David Hering, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Liverpool
Fiona Murphy, Assistant Professor in Refugee and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University
Leigh Wilson, Professor of English Literature, University of Westminster
Rachel Sykes, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, University of Birmingham
Sarah Annes Brown, Professor of English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University

From a longlist of 13, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on May 20.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird offers us glimpses of one imagined future for earth and humanity.

Its vision could be described as post-apocalyptic. After unspecified cataclysmic events, humans exist only in tiny, scattered communities and extinction seems imminent. But this is also…

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