Canadian writers Maria Reva and David Szalay have made the 13-book longlist for the 2025 Booker Prize.
The £50,000 (approx. $92,000 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K.
Reva is nominated for her debut novel Endling, which tells the story of three women and a last-of-his-kind snail whose lives are changed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yeva, a scientist, is obsessed with breeding rare snails and lives on her own in a mobile lab, funding her work by dating Westerners who have come to Ukraine on romance tours, hoping to find brides untouched by feminism.
Sisters Nastia and Solomiya are also entwined in the marriage industry, pretending to be a prospective bride and her translator to figure out what happened to their mother, a staunch activist against the industry who mysteriously disappeared.
As Russia invades and the war begins, their plans are foiled and the hard truths of war are examined.
In a media statement, this year’s prize jury said that Endling is “structurally wild and playful” and “heart-rending and angry.”
Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in New Westminster, B.C., where she currently lives.
Her short story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear won the 2022 Kobzar Literary Award and was on the 2020 Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize shortlist. She also writes the lyrics for operas.
Meanwhile, Montreal-born Hungarian English author Szalay made the longlist for his novel Flesh.
In Flesh, 15-year-old István has a relationship with a married woman, causing his life to spiral out of control. As he grows older, he continues to live a life of recklessness, achieving all his desires for a time — until they threaten to undo him completely.
“Travelling from Hungary to Iraq to London, and using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life,” reads the jury citation for Flesh.
Szalay’s novel All That Man Is was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and won the Gordon Burn Prize that same year. His other books include Turbulence, and London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
This year’s prize jury is comprised of Nigerian novelist Ayobami Adebayo, British broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power, American writer Kiley Reid and American actor Sarah Jessica Parker, who is best known for her role as Carrie in Sex and the City. She became a book publisher in 2020 with her imprint SJP Lit.
The jury is chaired by Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
The jury’s 13-book longlist chosen from 153 submissions also features writers from Albania, India, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, the U.K. and the U.S.
The complete list is as follows:
The six-book shortlist will be announced on Sept. 23 at a ceremony in London. Shortlisted writers receive £2,500 (approx. $4,600 Cdn) and a specially bound copy of their book.
The 2025 winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Nov. 9 in London.
Since 2013, authors from any nationality have been eligible for the Booker Prize. Past Canadian winners include Margaret Atwood (The Testaments), who split the 2019 prize money with British novelist and co-winner Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other).
Two other Canadians have won the prize since its inception in 1969: Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient and Yann Martel in 2002 for Life of Pi.
Last year’s winner was British author Samantha Harvey for her novel Orbital.
Many of the books are available in accessible formats on the Centre for Equitable Library Access website.
