Roddy Doyle will chair the judging panel for the 2025 Booker Prize, with actor Sarah Jessica Parker also on the panel.
The Irish author will helm discussions of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland between October 1st, 2024 and September 30th, 2025, with the winner to be announced next November.
Working alongside the 1993 Booker Prize winner are Parker, authors Ayobami Adebayo and Kiley Reid, and critic Chris Power.
Submissions are now open from publishers for the prize, which is worth £50,000 (€47,481) for the winner and £2,500 each for authors who make the shortlist of six books.
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“For more than 40 years, I’ve been writing novels, or editing novels, or thinking about the next novel,” Doyle said.
“For longer still – since my mother taught me how to read – I’ve filled hours of every day with novels, reading them, rereading them, just gazing at them. ‘His head was never out of the books’ is two-thirds of my biography.
“So, to have licence to do little else but read the year’s best novels, to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, to examine the remarkable, unique things that great writers can do with the shared language, English – I can’t wait.
“I’m looking forward to working with a great panel of judges. I’ve never been in a book club before, but I think I’m probably joining a good one.’”
Doyle won the prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and is the author of 13 novels.
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Other Irish winners have included Paul Lynch for Prophet Song (2023), Anna Burns for Milkman (2018), Anne Enright for The Gathering (2007) and John Banville for The Sea (2005). Dublin-born Iris Murdoch also won the prize in 1978.
“The 2025 judges form a jury of creative peers like no other,” said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. “We’ve never before had three Booker authors on the panel. Roddy, the first past Booker winner to chair the judges, has already brought generosity, wit and calm to the process, and I have no doubt that he will draw together this stellar crowd as they seek the best fiction of the year.”
Parker, best known for her starring role in the television series Sex and the City, is a prominent supporter of contemporary fiction. She launched her own literary imprint, SJP Lit, in 2023. She is a frequent visitor to the Co Donegal Gaeltacht, where she has a home with her husband, actor Matthew Broderick.
Power, the British author of the novel A Lonely Man, is a regular critic on BBC Radio and in publications such as the Guardian, the New York Times and the London Review of Books.
US author Reid was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 for Such A Fun Age, while Nigerian author Adebayo’s A Spell of Good Things was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023
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