What is The Booker Prize and how does it work?

It's the Booker time of the year.

The shortlist of six novels has been published and a winner will be announced in November.

The Booker is probably the most watched literary annual award, rewarding the best novels in English.

The Booker prize bills itself as the “leading literary award in the English-speaking world”. Certainly it is one of, if not, the most watched literary prizes in the world.

It rewards what it believes is the best novel in a year published in English in the United Kingdom and Ireland. But that definition hides a multitude of wrinkles.

First off, the Booker gets around the question of what is a novel by actually saying the prize is aimed at the best “work of sustained fiction”, thereby having a fairly wide brief.

But the biggest issue is in that definition of being published in the UK. Initially the Booker – for a long time named after its sponsor the Man Booker – was for the best novel by a Commonwealth, Irish or South African writer. However, in 2014 the eligibility was widened to any English-language novel, so long as it was published for readers in the UK. The biggest result was to make American writers eligible.

It is really. Judging which novel is best runs into the same problems as trying to name the best TV series of all time or the finest artwork of the year. It is subjective.

The biggest issue for the judges is adjudicating between rewarding literary skill and readability. Or whether that matters at all.

The Irish novelist John Banville, a winner for The Sea, said the prize promotes “good middlebrow fiction”. And a chair of the judges once said it wanted people to buy and read the books, not buy and admire them.

There are also some very fine literary spats at the Bookers, though things have been very well-behaved for the last few years. The 1990s and 2000s were a high point for controversy with some wonderful rows over winners, like when one judge announced she objected to that year’s winner (James Kelman’s How Late it was, How Late) which she called “frankly crap”.

Most years there is some kind of debate; should there be literary prizes? the winner is too readable, too unreadable; the prize is too British, too global. But the heat has been missing recently.

Publishing houses nominate their best books, so long as they meet the criterion – written in English, published in the UK and Ireland.

A panel of judges then sit down and start reading. They need to get through about a novel every day and a half. The number of nominated books is currently at around 160 a year.

Three months out they produce a longlist; 13 novels they will consider for the prize, “the Booker dozen”. It is often in the long list that you find some surprising gems.

Three months out from the prize announcement, the judges announce a short list of six, with their views on why they loved the book.

The judges have sometimes spoken later on the sheer volume of reading to get through – and the difficulty of making a call.

But in mid-November, at a ceremony in London, they do make that call. A winner is announced.

The winning author takes home £50,000 (about NZ$115,000).

The win is a good haul, though not as good as the Nobel Prize for Literature which is 11 million Swedish Krona (around NZ$1.7 million), but a lot more generous than France's Prix Goncourt which earns the winner €10 (NZ$18). New Zealand's Ockham awards disburse a particularly good prize of $65,000 to the winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

But the real gain is in career boost and book sales.

The Booker winner is catapulted onto the reading list of book groups around the work. It goes into the front window of independent bookstores. The author is interviewed and feted at writers' festivals.

Bernardine Evaristo, who won in 2019 for Girl, Woman, Other, says she suddenly “given a certain kind of gravitas and respect and authority".

Then there is the sales boom. The winner’s book sales can double or more overnight. Two top novels from 2023, winner Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and unofficial runner-up The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (there is no second place announced but critics generally felt it deserved a place) are still selling well at New Zealand bookstores. Last year’s winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey is prominent on the tables and shelves of book shops.

Not this year, but there has been a strong New Zealand connection in the past. Keri Hulme won for the bone people in 1985. Lloyd Jones was shortlisted for Mr Pip in 2007 and Eleanor Catton won with The Luminaries in 2013.

The favourite is probably Kiran Desai who has spent 19 years on her epic novel of India and migrants.

That would be Flesh by David Szalay. It’s the life story of a taciturn man, Istvan, who a critic said makes “a man of few words” seem noisy. It is either a gripping life story, remarkably told in sparing language – or really hard to like a person who communicates so little.

The big event will be on Monday, 10 November 2025 when the winner will be announced at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. It will also be streamed on the Booker Prize social media channels.