Sarah Jessica Parker on the 2025 Booker Prize judging panel

Irish author Roddy Doyle will chair the 2025 Booker Prize judging panel. Doyle, who has written 13 novels, is the first person to chair the panel who has won the prize himself. He won the Booker for his 1993 novel ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’.

“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,” Doyle said of his appointment.

“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,” he added.

Doyle is joined on the panel by actor Sarah Jessica Parker, and authors Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power, and Kiley Reid.

Parker is best known for her starring role in ‘Sex and the City’ and its sequel ‘And Just Like That…’ as Carrie Bradshaw, a New York socialite famous for her weekly magazine column. Like the character, Parker is also in publishing.

For the best part of a decade, Parker has worked on the editorial side of the publishing industry, first as editorial director at SJP for Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin.

Last year, Parker launched SJP Lit, her own literary imprint for publisher Zando which has platformed writing from underrepresented voices, including ‘They Dream in Gold’ by Mai Sennaar, Alina Grabowski’s ‘Women and Children First’, Elysha Chang’s ‘A Quitter’s Paradise’, and ‘Coleman Hill’, written by Kim Coleman Foote.

It’s the most Booker-nominated panel in history. Both Adébáyọ̀ and Reid have been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Adébáyọ̀’s novel ‘A Spell of Good Things’ was longlisted in 2023 and Reid was longlisted in 2020 for her novel ‘Such a Fun Age’.

The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. Authors shortlisted for the prize gain global readerships and an increase in profile and sales, and the winner can expect their career to be transformed.

British writer Samantha Harvey won this year’s Booker Prize for fiction with ‘Orbital’, a short, but profound novel which follows six international astronauts as they circle Earth aboard the the International Space Station.

Harvey won the £50,000 (€60,000) prize for what she has called a “space pastoral” which she began writing during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Submissions are now open to publishers for the 2025 prize. As books published or written by judges of the prize are not eligible for submission, SJP Lit titles published in the UK and/or Ireland will not be considered for the 2025 prize.