Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Kiley Reid are on the Booker Prize 2025 jury announced in London, UK on Monday, December 9, 2024.
The Booker Prize for Fiction, founded in 1969, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Some winners of African descent have been Marlon James, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Bernadine Evaristo, and Damon Galgut.
The jury of five members for 2025, including Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Kiley Reid, was announced in London last Monday. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is the author of the novels Stay with Me and A Spell of Good Things, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023. Her stories have been translated into over 20 languages. Stay with Me was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize, and the Kwani? Manuscript Project and won the Prix Les Afriques and the 9mobile Prize for Literature. A Spell of Good Things was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Encore Award after being longlisted for the Booker. Adébáyọ̀ is also the author of Provenance, which was staged as a multi-screen immersive installation co-produced in 2021 by Mutiny and the University of East Anglia. She studied at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria and the University of East Anglia, earning degrees in Literature and Creative Writing.
Ayòbámi Adébáyò who has also been on the Women’s Prize 2024 jury said afterward, “When I was in my late teens/early twenties, whenever my mum visited in the UK for a fellowship or conference, she would return to Nigeria with a Booker Prize-winning book as a gift for me. Which was how I got copies of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question and more. I’m truly thrilled and honoured to judge the 2025 prize alongside a stellar lineup. Oh, and my mum is so proud. #bookerprize”
Kiley Reid was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 for her first novel, Such a Fun Age. It was a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her second novel, Come and Get It, was also a New York Times bestseller, a Good Morning America Book Club pick, and named a best book of 2024 by the New Yorker, NPR, ELLE, and New York Magazine’s Vulture. Reid is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, the Guardian, and others. She has taught graduate-level seminars and workshops at Temple University and the University of Michigan.
Submissions for the Booker Prize 2025 and International Booker Prize 2025 are now open.
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