Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu is on the longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize, the influential award for translated fiction, with the novel Solenoid, translated into English by Sean Cotter and published at Pushkin Press.

He is the first Romanian author to be longlisted for the prize, alongside 12 other authors nominated for the International Booker Prize for the first time.

Last year, Solenoid won the Dublin Literary Award, the first book translated from Romanian to win the distinction and the only translated work to make it onto the award’s shortlist.

The longlist of 13 books – 11 novels and two collections of short stories – has been chosen by a judging panel chaired by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter. Porter is joined by prize-winning poet, director, and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton.

“Solenoid is an uncategorizable epic of interconnected realities, a book that seems to be about... everything. On a single page you might be flung from intimate insights into the banality of a teacher’s life to grand theoretical re-imaginings of the universe, to microscopic insights into mites, matter, love or letter-forms. It’s a mind-boggling, bravura and ceaselessly entertaining book, unlike anything else. The translation struck us as word perfect, a feat of attention to detail that transports us with total control from Communist Romania to the far sci-fi reaches of the imagination and back again,” the International Booker Prize 2025 judges said about Solenoid.

Cărtărescu has published more than 25 books of poetry, criticism and fiction. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others, and has been translated into 23 languages.

The International Booker Prize selection celebrates works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 1, 2024 and April 30, 2025, as judged by the 2025 panel. The judges chose their longlist from 154 books submitted by publishers, the highest number since the prize was launched in its current format in 2016.

The six books shortlisted for this year’s prize will be announced on April 8, 2025.  Each shortlisted title will be awarded a prize of GBP 5,000: GBP 2,500 for the author and GBP 2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).

The announcement of the winning book for 2025 will take place on May 20, 2025, at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London. The winner receives GBP 50,000: GBP 25,000 for the author and GBP 25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).

This year's longlist includes authors representing 10 nationalities: Danish (Solvej Balle), Surinamese-Dutch (Astrid Roemer), French (Gaëlle Bélem, Vincent Delecroix, Anne Serre), Indian (Banu Mushtaq), Italian (Vincenzo Latronico), Japanese (Saou Ichikawa, Hiromi Kawakami), Palestinian (Ibtisam Azem), Romanian (Mircea Cărtărescu), Mexican (Dahlia de la Cerda) and Swiss (Christian Kracht).

The translators, meanwhile, represent eight countries: Iraq (Sinan Antoon), France (Laëtitia Saint-Loubert), Brazil (Julia Sanches), Japan (Asa Yoneda), India (Deepa Bhasthi), Scotland (Barbara J. Haveland), England (Polly Barton, Karen Fleetwood, Sophie Hughes, Mark Hutchinson, Helen Stevenson), and the USA (Daniel Bowles, Heather Cleary, Sean Cotter, Lucy Scott).

The list features 11 independent publishers representing 12 titles, the highest number in International Booker Prize history, including Irish publisher Bullaun Press and Leeds-based Small Axes for the first time. Only one book on the longlist is not published by an independent (Hunchback, published by Viking).

Ten original languages are represented on the longlist: Arabic (The Book of Disappearance), Danish (On the Calculation of Volume I), Dutch (On a Woman's Madness), French (A Leopard-Skin Hat, Small Boat, There's a Monster Behind the Door), German (Eurotrash), Italian (Perfection), Japanese (Hunchback, Under the Eye of the Big Bird), Kannada (Heart Lamp), Romanian (Solenoid) and Spanish (Reservoir Bitches). Heart Lamp becomes the first book nominated for the International Booker Prize that was originally written in Kannada, which is spoken predominantly in southern India and is the first language of some 38 million people, with Solenoid the first translated from Romanian.

(Photo: Cătălina Flămînzeanu, courtesy of International Booker Prize)

simona@romania-insider.com