LIVE UPDATES: 6 finalists vie for coveted Booker Prize literary award for fiction

So what ar the betting odds?

U.K. Bookie William j. J. Hill has british people author Andrew Miller winning the prize for The Land in Winter with 15-8 odds.

Indian writer Kiran Desai comes in close second with 2-1 odds for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

As a Canadian, I'm rooting for Montreal-born David Szalay's Flesh (it has the next highest odds at 4-1). But as someone who stayed up way past her bed time last night devouring The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, I wouldn't be mad if that novel got its flowers.

Of course, £50,000 ($92,300 Cdn) isn't chump change. But winning the Booker is about more than just the prize money — it also guarantees a ton of press and a sales bump.

Last year's winner, Orbital by British writer Samantha Harvey, sold over 20,000 copies in the first week since its win, reaching the top of the U.K. Bestsellers chart, according to The Guardian.

The week after Douglas Stuart won the prize in 2020, his novel Shuggie Bain sold more than 25,000 copies in the U.K., according to the Booker Prize website. That's a 1,900 per cent increase over the week before his win was announced.

Being on the shortlist is also still a big deal. The runners-up get £2,500 ($4,600 Cdn) and their fair share of media attention in the lead-up to the announcement.

Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital. Not only was she the first woman to win since 2019, she was selected out of a shortlist that had already made history: five out of six of the books were authored by women.

The shortlisted books were James by Percival Everett, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, Held by Anne Michaels (a Canadian), The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.

Orbital takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. It was the first Booker Prize winner set in space, and the second-shortest book to win, at 136 pages.

Harvey was the only British author on the shortlist last year, and the first woman to win the prize since it was shared by Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood in 2019.

Kind of.

The Booker Prize is administered by the Booker Prize Foundation, a non-profit organization that also annually awards a prize for fiction translated into English, the International Booker Prize.

But that international prize previously had different criteria: it was awarded for a lifetime body of work, and there was no rule saying it couldn't be in English.

Munro, an internationally known Canadian short-story writer, won that version of the prize, then called the Man Booker International Prize, in 2009.

In 2015, after the Booker Prize had expanded to include writers from outside the Commonwealth, the international prize became a contest among single books translated into English.

Margaret Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo jointly win Booker Prize

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and British author Bernardine Evaristo split the prestigious Booker Prize after the judging panel broke the rules when they couldn’t pick.

Montreal-born, Hungary-based David Szalay is up for this year's prize, and several Canadians have already won the Booker Prize since its inception in 1969.

Margaret Atwood has won twice, for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and The Testaments in 2019 (when she was a joint winner along with the U.K.'s Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other).

Michael Ondaatje won in 1992 for The English Patient. Yann Martel was awarded the prize in 2002 for Life of Pi. And Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised author Eleanor Catton won for The Luminaries in 2013.

While the Booker Prize is now open to all writers of all nationalities, it wasn't always this way.

Before 2014, the prize only accepted books by writers from the U.K., Ireland and the Commonwealth.

The decision to open up the prize was somewhat controversial, with people worried that American literature would dominate. But since then, only two American authors have won it: Paul Beatty in 2016 and George Saunders in 2017.

From 2002 to 2019 the prize was sponsored by the Man Group plc, an London-based investment management firm, during which it was called the Man Booker Prize.

In 2019, the San Francisco-based foundation Crankstart became the new sponsor, and the name reverted to simply the Booker Prize.

Longtime fans of HBO's Sex and the City may only know Parker as the show's fashion-loving protagonist Carrie Bradshaw.

But Parker's credentials go beyond acting. The self-described devoted reader also has her own literary imprint, SJP Lit, in partnership with independent publisher Zando.

The imprint seeks to elevate international and underrepresented voices. Some of its recent titles include They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar, Alina Grabowski's Women and Children First, and Elysha Chang's A Quitter's Paradise.

She recently told the New York Times that being selected as a judge was "the thrill of a life," but added she didn't think she was worthy because so many judges are academics and she hadn't pursued higher education.

"Even when I went into publishing, I felt very nervous about people taking me seriously. I felt like an interloper, and that I was constantly in a position of having to prove myself," she told the Times last December.

She and the other judges read 153 books over eight months. When the judges revealed the Booker Prize finalists in September, Parker told BBC taking part in the process had been "a privilege."

The coveted Booker Prize is awarded by a team of judges. Leading them is Roddy Doyle, an acclaimed Irish novelist (some may know him best for The Commitments, which was adapted into a 1991 movie by the same name). He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Also on the panel:

Every year, the Booker Prize honours the best original novel written in English and published in the U.K. And/or Ireland. Today at around 4:30 p.m. ET, we'll find out this year's winner.

They'll take home £50,000 (approximately $92,300 Cdn), a sum sponsored by Crankstart, a foundation based in San Francisco.

Here's who's up for the 2025 Booker Prize:

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