Booker 2025 Finalists Speak About the Origins of Their Works

International Book News Agency (IBNA) – Elaheh Shams: Six authors shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize speak about the initial sparks that led to the creation of their works; from a forgotten newspaper report to a family memory and confronting a professional failure.

Kiran Desai

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

After my father’s death, while emptying his apartment, we were faced with a rush of people. They took his wardrobes and chairs, his shirts and socks. Scavengers carried away rusty items, and a young girl took his guitar. It was raining, but my eyes were dry. There was no time for tears; empires collapse with such speed. Another scene was lost. Before, I wrote about loneliness; about Sonia and Sunny who meet on a night train to their grandparents’ home; a journey into the past, the place that is a kind of homeland for all of us. I saw both the healing bond between them and its fragility.

The relationship between Sonia and Sunny develops over years and continents, from the United States to Italy, Mexico, and India. In this continuous movement, in a world without a center, I wrote about the gap between nations, races, genders, and religions, all appearing in the form of a kind of loneliness. I wrote about spaces where news narratives surprisingly changed their nature, where humans transformed themselves into unrecognizable beings. And I wrote about shadow lands, full of ghosts and nightmares that predicted the dark undercurrent of history could explode again at any moment. I wrote about the longing for the decaying natural world and about magical creatures that once hid in forests and oceans. But I was equally interested in loneliness that changes form and becomes a calm that comes after the end of war; a solitude sought in a time of transformation. Artistic and beautiful loneliness; the discovery of individual dignity and privacy.

Everything I experienced during the years of writing poured into the river of this book: notes and articles. There came a time when my book fell apart, and I struggled to maintain its coherence. Everywhere I went, that heavy notebook was with me, weighing down my suitcase. I placed it in market bags to send it from one point to another to my home in New York; a home that would fill with papers.

My final inspiration was a painting by Francesco Clemente. As a gift, he sent me one of his paintings: a faceless demonic deity, as if from a primal forest. In this formless, eyeless goddess I placed next to my desk, I found a visual symbol to connect all the stories, to think about who is in whose gaze, and who is seen and controlled; whether in power, in journalism, in art, or in love. The unseen world and the shadow world, along with the narrative of Sonia and Sunny’s unresolved love, together formed the novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Ben Markovits

The Rest of Our Lives

One afternoon I wrote the first few pages and put them aside. Perhaps a year later I looked at them again. My own children were growing older, and I wanted to write about a period of family life that was coming to an end. Those initial pages were a way into the subject: a man drops his daughter off at university and, instead of returning home, keeps driving.

The last sentence I had written was: “Even when everything settled down, the highest grade I could give my marriage was a C-minus, which means you can’t get a better grade than a B in the rest of your life.” This sentence seemed logical, but it was clearly the wrong way of thinking, and this tension could form the basis of a novel.

By the time I finished the first draft, both I and my narrator, Tom, knew what we had on our hands, and I was undergoing chemotherapy. At the same time, strange medical symptoms had appeared in me: sudden fatigue while running, inexplicable dizziness, a swollen face in the morning. My GP found nothing, but I incorporated these symptoms into the story as a symbol of middle age; a gradual breakdown that cannot be fully understood. This experience, undoubtedly, affected the book, not just the plot, but my feelings about the narrative. Initially, I wanted to leave Tom completely free and alone at the end, but the more I wrote and the sicker I became, that ending seemed less meaningful. Illness draws a lot of attention to oneself and changes how others see you, even if temporarily.

One problem with road novels is that the protagonist usually escapes from the story’s main source, here from an unhappy marriage. But it seemed to me that sometimes it’s easier to talk to people who are no longer present; you continue the conversation in your mind, sometimes more honestly than speaking face-to-face. In other words, although Tom moves away from his wife, the novel can still be about reconciliation; not necessarily between the two of them, but with a new stage of life they both have to face.

Susan Choi

Flashlight

Some time ago I saw Eleanor Catton ask Sarah Moss about her latest work: “What is the oldest ancestor of this book?” It was a wonderful question because it shows that the genesis of a book sometimes begins long before writing, or even before becoming aware of the possibility of writing it. The prehistoric ancestor of this book is a trip to Japan in my childhood with my parents in the late 1970s. I had never been outside America, and Japan at that time was not as Westernized as it is today; the cultural shock was profound. I never forgot that trip. Years later, when I became a writer, I wished to write about it, but although the trip was transformative for me, there was no specific narrative event to attract a reader.

Fast forward twenty years. In my first apartment in New York, I was reading a copy of The New York Times. The headline “Tale of an Escapee Reminded Japan of a Lost Girl” caught my attention. My first book had not yet been published, let alone had I learned the habit of writers, which is to pay attention to ideas and take notes on them. But that article engaged my mind from beginning to end: it was about a Japanese teenage girl who had disappeared without a trace while returning from badminton practice. That event happened exactly one year before our family trip, and the girl was my age, or slightly older. This coincidence was not strange, but it kept lingering in my mind.

Another twenty years pass. I’m reading Dickens, which was strangely suitable for the global pandemic era. I was trying to figure out if I could write about the dreamlike Japan of my childhood, but from another child’s perspective; a child facing catastrophe. As if out of an obsession to ward off bad things, I always found myself imagining a familiar situation that had passed through the filter of the worst possible scenarios and emerged transformed and unpleasant on the other side. The reality of the “lightning strike” I had in mind felt so powerful that it seemed overly exaggerated for a story, and this stopped me again. I decided to “cheat”; instead of narrating the incident, I would write about its aftermath, without revealing what the lightning strike was. The result was the short story Flashlight, published in late 2020. After that, I had no choice but to fully execute that lightning strike, and the result was the book Flashlight.

Andrew Miller

The Land in Winter

The origin of a novel quickly recedes into a haze of uncertainty. The rule is that it begins months or even years before you yourself think. A new idea, when you explore it a little, often resembles an old idea you once loved but didn’t know what to do with. Perhaps it started with the weather, or a visual image; a landscape in a snowy fog. Then, around that image, a time and place took shape: 1962, a village outside Bristol; an unnamed village, crafted from memories of my childhood years. And at the heart of this surge of images and possibilities, a memory of my mother resided; a simple narrative of the day she and my father, a doctor, ran across the field to attend an emergency at a nearby house.

From the very beginning, I had a good feeling about the book and the writing itself. My previous novel was an anxious endeavor, but this time with The Land in Winter, I suddenly felt free. I wasn’t too concerned with themes. As long as the forward flow of the story was powerful, I was happy to follow it. One of my main intentions was to allow the four main protagonists to follow their own destinies in their own right way; no one was forcibly guided by the plot.

I wanted the book to retain its wild atmosphere, to remain somewhat strange. In the summer of 2023, I submitted the manuscript. I thought it was almost finished, but my editor determined there was still a lot of work to be done. Things I imagined were present were completely invisible to her. So a year of intensive rewriting began; not merely for tidying up, but to preserve that rebelliousness while better shaping and deepening understanding. When I submitted it the second time, I had “snow blindness”; a feeling many writers know at the end of a long project. You no longer know what you’ve created. The affirmations I received this spring and summer were a deep comfort because they showed that feeling of freedom and joy was not illusory. You cannot write unless you trust your intuition.

Katie Kitamura

Audition

The novel Audition has a simple plot: the narrator, an actress, is rehearsing a difficult play. She is successful, happy, and settled in her life. Then a young man approaches her and says he believes he is her son. From that moment, two narratives unfold; two versions of reality. In one, the young man is a stranger; in the other, her son.

I can pinpoint the precise origin of the novel. Several years ago, I encountered a headline that read: “A stranger told me he was my son.” I immediately knew I had material I wanted to work with. I deliberately did not click on the link to read the article; I wanted to linger in the strange feeling of the headline. On one hand, I was fascinated by how an encounter could transform a person’s entire self-awareness and place in the world.

But on the other hand, I saw an appeal in the headline’s illogicality. The two words “stranger” and “my son” seemed completely contradictory and even incompatible. I didn’t want the mystery of this contradiction to be resolved. I felt the article probably had a logical explanation for the headline; for example, the author had put a child up for adoption, or perhaps the stranger had a mental disorder. Neither of these options was satisfying to me because they diminished the strange enigma of the headline. Some time later, on a sidewalk with a friend, I told her the story; how much it had enchanted me and how I still didn’t know how to enter the world I sensed behind the headline. My friend asked me to repeat the sentence, then said: “But that’s what parenting is; every time my son comes home from college, it’s like a stranger has walked into the house.”

After that conversation, I knew what I was looking for in the novel: I wanted to write about how universal experiences — love, motherhood — can be two contradictory feelings in the moment. I never clicked on that headline, but today I think perhaps the story behind it was not about adoption or delusion or deception, but a simple human narrative of a long process in which a child inevitably grows up and becomes a stranger to their parents; and about the simultaneous satisfaction and devastation of this experience.

David Szalay

Flesh

Flesh was shaped in the shadow of failure. In the autumn of 2020, I abandoned a novel I had been working on for nearly four years; it was a heartbreaking decision. The result was a waste of a huge amount of time, hope, energy, and emotion. I had written over 100,000 words, but for a long time, I had felt the work wasn’t succeeding. Struggling to save it had become torture. So, with a feeling of exhaustion mixed with relief, I decided to put it aside, get a light night’s sleep, and start with a blank page in the morning.

At that point, I had about a year left until the deadline to deliver a new book to my publishers. This meant I only had one year (or less) to write a novel from scratch. The pressure of this was heavy for me. A few weeks of staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor were enough to realize I needed to ask for an extension, which I did, and it was fine.

Nevertheless, doubt never left me; a feeling that said abandoning one unfinished novel might be acceptable, but two in a row would be a psychological disaster. I couldn’t sleep, and my spirits plummeted. The hardest part was deciding on the subject: what to write about? Where to start? Sometimes I wished someone would tell me what to do, what to write about, but there was no one. I was alone, in a dream mingled with anxiety.

I forced myself to start with a few simple ideas. I decided the story would be partly English and partly Hungarian. And the theme, in some way, would reflect my feeling that living is, first and foremost, a physical experience; all other aspects spring from that physicality and ultimately return to it, as we ourselves once again become what W. H. Auden memorably called “the irresponsible matter.” These two ideas were the fixed starting points; the seeds from which Flesh grew.