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“Reading is always an imaginative collaboration between the writer and the reader.” David Szalay talks about his Booker Prize–winning novel, Flesh (Jonathan Cape, 2025), and the episodic style of writing and use of white space in this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown.
In this video, Samantha Harvey accepts the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023), which snapshots one day in the lives of six astronauts traveling through space. “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves,” says Harvey in her speech.
“The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel, though I had to write the book anyway.” In this video, Paul Lynch accepts the 2023 Booker Prize for Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023), a dystopian novel about the hardships of a family living in a totalitarian Ireland.
“Remember if you sit at your desk for fifteen or twenty years every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does.” In this excerpt of an interview for CUNY-TV’s Irish Writers in America series, Booker Prize–winning author Anne Enright shares her ten rules for writing fiction.
“Numbers go on and on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of everything.” In this video, Damon Galgut reads from his novel The Promise (Chatto & Windus, 2021), for which he won the 2021 Booker Prize.
“Reading during lockdown created a really powerful sense of connection with the books.” In this video, Maya Jasanoff, chair of the judges for the 2021 Booker Prize, speaks about the “deliberate quality” of the thirteen longlisted titles, which include Second Place by Rachel Cusk, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Bewilderment by Richard Powers.
“She’s seen by those around her as being too much, but in fact, it’s not that she is too much, it’s that the world around her isn’t enough.” In this video for Perthshire Pride, Douglas Stuart introduces the characters from his debut novel, Shuggie Bain (Grove Press, 2020), for which he won the 2020 Booker Prize, and reads a short excerpt.
“As a writer, the idea of readers coming to your work is what it’s all about,” says Brandon Taylor, whose debut novel, Real Life, is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. In this watch party video announcing the six finalists for the prize, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation Gaby Wood introduces the 2020 judges and the nominated authors offer their reactions.
“It’s full of bold writing, fresh writing, accomplished writing, from points of view that aren’t always expected.” Judges Margaret Busby, Lee Child, Sameer Rahim, Lemn Sissay, and Emily Wilson talk about the thirteen novels longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, which includes This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel, The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste, Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, Real Life by Brandon Taylor, and How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang.
In this Waterstones video, Bernadine Evaristo introduces her novel Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019), which she describes as “fusion fiction” and a “celebration of Black womanhood,” and the books that influenced her as a young writer. Evaristo won the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other, sharing the prize with Margaret Atwood for The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, 2019).
