Mircea Cartarescu's novel Solenoid in the English rendition by Sean Cotter is on the 13-strong longlist of the books selected for the 2025 International Booker Prize, according to the announcement made on Tuesday by the organizers, The Guardian reports.
This year's ''unconventional" list includes 13 writers, all of whom are at their first-time nomination, while translator Sophie Hughes appears for a record-breaking fifth time with her rendering of Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection.
The nominees are in contention for the Ł50,000 prize for the best book translated to English, an amount that will be divided equally between the winning author and the translator.
This year's list features the highest-ever number of independent publishers, with 12 of 13 titles coming from indie presses.
Mircea Cartarescu is the first Romanian author to be longlisted for the prize.Set in the late '70s and early '80s communist Bucharest, Solenoid begins with the diaristic reflections of a teacher before expanding into an existential, surrealist account of the narrator's journey through alternate realities. In May 2024, Solenoid also won the 100,000 Dublin Literary Award.
The other titles on the longlist are as follows: The Book of Disappearance by Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem, translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon; On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton; Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowles; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes; On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated from Dutch by Lucy Scott; A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.
Author and judging chair Max Porter said that he hopes the "unconventional" longlist will "exhilarate" readers. "These books bring us into the agony of family, workplace or nation-state politics, the near-spiritual secrecy of friendship, the inner architecture of erotic feeling, the banality of capitalism and the agitations of faith," he said.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on 8 April, with the winner revealed at a ceremony at London's Tate Modern on May 20.
Alongside Porter on this year's judging panel are poet Caleb Femi, writer Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton.
The judges selected the longlist from 154 books submitted by publishers. The 2025 prize was open to works of long-form fiction and collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland between May 1, 2024 and April 30, 2025.
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