The judging panel for the 2025 Booker Prize has been announced, and one unlikely Hollywood A-Lister is taking part.
Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker will join the judges as they decide who will win one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes. Orbital by Samantha Harvey was 2024’s winner.
As the Prize opens for submissions from publishers on Tuesday (10 December), the panel will also feature the award’s first Booker Prize winner to be chair of the judges. Irish author Roddy Doyle won the award in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha about a 10-year-old boy living in Dublin in 1968.
Two Booker Prize longlisted authors will join Doyle on the panel. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is the author of A Spell of Good Things, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023, and Kiley Reid was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 for her first novel, Such a Fun Age. A Lonely Man author Chris Power will also join them.
While some may be surprised by Parker’s participation in the decision-making process for the high-brow accolade, her inclusion comes after a history of experience in the publishing industry.
In June 2023, she launched SJP Lit, her own literary imprint in partnership with independent publisher Zando to champion international and underrepresented voices. Recent titles include 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.
She also served as Editorial Director of the literary imprint SJP for Hogarth, publishing the New York Times bestseller A Place For Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza who is also married to Oscar-nominated actor Riz Ahmed, winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize; Golden Child by Claire Adam; and Dawn, the critically acclaimed story collection by the jailed Turkish politician and human rights lawyer Selahattin Demirtas.
Parker has additionally served as Honorary Chair of the American Library Association’s online reading resource platform Central Book Club, board member of the nonprofit organisation United for Libraries, and member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities during the Obama administration.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation said about Parker’s appointment, “[I] have in recent months enjoyed sharing book recommendations with Sarah Jessica, who has passionately supported contemporary fiction for many years.” She called the group, “a jury of creative peers like no other”.
Doyle added, “For more than forty years, I’ve been writing novels, or editing novels, or thinking about the next novel. For longer still – since my mother taught me how to read – I’ve filled hours of every day with novels, reading them, re-reading them, just gazing at them.
“So, 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.”
