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Literary Awards: Booker Prizes

International Booker Prize Winner - 2025

Banu Mushtaq, International Booker Prize winner 2025

Banu Mushtaq (ಬಾನು ಮುಷ್ತಾಕ್), India

International Booker Prize Winner - 2024

Jenny Erpenbeck, Intl Booker Prize Winner 2024

Jenny Erpenbeck, Germany

(Photo by Heike Huslage-Koch - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

International Booker Prize Winner - 2023

Georgi Gospodinov (Георги Господинов), Bulgaria

(photo by "Mrs Robinson" at Bulgarian Wikipedia - Image in the public domain, taken and reproduced with the author's permission)

International Booker Prize Winner - 2022

                     

Geetanjali Shree (गीतांजलि श्री), India

(photo by R. Schein - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

International Booker Prize Winner - 2021


David Diop, International Booker Prize winner 2021

David Diop, France
(photo by Hermance Triay)

Booker Prize Winner 2024 - SAMANTHA HARVEY

Samantha Harvey (Ditton, Kent, United Kingdom, 1975) won the 2024 Booker Prize with her fifth novel, Orbital. The story follows six astronauts of different nationalities aboard the International Space Station in a 24-hour period. In each of their sixteen orbits around Earth during that time frame, they all share their reflections on existence, isolation, and environmental fragility. In between chapters, other unrelated voices are introduced.

Below, the official video of the announcement during the award ceremony, with Lynch's acceptance speech

International Booker Prize Winner 2025 - BANU MUSHTAQ

Banu Mushtaq (Hassan, Karnataka, India, 1948) is the International Winner for 2025. Along with her translator, Deepa Bhasthi, Mushtaq won with Heart Lamp, the first book written originally in the Kannada language and the first story collection to win this prize. Bhasthi is also the first Indian translator ever awarded a Booker. Taking inspiration from her work as a life-long activist, a lawyer and an advocate for women's rights, in these collected stories Mushtaq depicts the lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in Southern India and the challenges they face from a highly-conservative and male-dominated society.

Below, panel chair Max Porter announces the 2025 winners, with acceptance speeches from both Mushtaq and Bhasthi:

Booker Prizes

Since 2002, the Booker Prize Foundation is responsible for the Booker award. In 2005, the Institution also established the bi-annual International award (to become annual, with different rules, from 2016 onwards).

Booker Prize

The prize was launched in 1969 with the aim to promote the reading of quality fiction in the UK and has since become the leading British literary award. Every year it rewards the best original full-length novel written in the English language by a British, Irish or Commonwealth author and first published in the year leading up to the award.


International Booker Prize

The prize started in 2005 as a biennial event awarding living international writers for their achievement in fiction for a body of work either published originally in English or translated into the English language, in consideration of their literary contribution to fiction on the world stage. Starting in 2016, it evolved into an annual award for a single work of fiction, translated into English and published in the UK. Novels and collections of short stories alike will be eligible.

 

Booker Prize winners in the past 5 years