Sarah Jessica Parker is on the judging panel of the 2025 Booker prize, it has been announced today.
Though on the face of it, the American actor might seem a surprising choice to judge the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction, the Sex and the City star has established herself in the books industry in recent years. In 2016, she began serving as editorial director at SJP for Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin, before launching her own imprint, SJP Lit, in partnership with independent publisher Zando last year. She also shares book recommendations on her Instagram account.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker prize foundation, said in recent months she has “enjoyed sharing book recommendations with Sarah Jessica, who has passionately supported contemporary fiction for many years.”
Parker follows other actors who have judged the prize in recent rounds, including Adjoa Andoh and Robert Webb, who said that reading the number of books assigned is “impossible”. For the 2024 prize, each judge had to read more than 150 novels in seven months.
About that task, Parker told the New York Times that the judging appointment is well-timed because she isn’t on set at the moment. “I will carve out every moment I can,” she said. She says she is feeling “pretty optimistic about being able to do it”.
Being asked to judge the prize “felt very daunting”, said Parker. “I think of judges as academics, learned, experienced in ways I’m just not. I didn’t pursue higher education. I don’t have any degrees.” She added that when she went into publishing, she “felt like an interloper” and was “constantly” having to prove herself.
The 2025 judging panel will be chaired by Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993 with his book Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Two previously longlisted authors appear on the panel: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, whose novel A Spell of Good Things was longlisted last year, and Kiley Reid, who was longlisted in 2020 for the novel Such a Fun Age. The fifth panel member is the author and critic Chris Power, who regularly writes reviews for the Guardian.
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Doyle, the first past Booker winner to chair the panel, “has already brought generosity, wit and calm to the process, and I have no doubt that he will draw together this stellar crowd as they seek the best fiction of the year”, said Wood.
Adébáyọ̀ and Reid, “both past longlistees and very different writers, are perfectly placed to identify a cohort following in their footsteps”, said Wood, adding that she has “long admired” Power’s “acuity and taste”.
Doyle said he can’t wait 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 English. “I’ve never been in a book club before, but I think I’m probably joining a good one.”
The prize is now open to submissions from publishers. The judges will consider works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025. The “Booker dozen” longlist of 12 or 13 titles will be announced in July, with the shortlist announced in September and the winner, who will receive £50,000, revealed in November.
