Actress Sarah Jessica Parker has joined the judging panel for next year’s Booker Prize.
The Sex And The City star, 59, will help decide who wins the £50,000 literary award, which recognises the best work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
Booker Prize-longlisted authors Ayobami Adebayo and Kiley Reid, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power, and Irish writer Roddy Doyle – who won the award in 1993 – will join Parker on the judging panel.
Over the next seven months the panel will be required to read approximately 150 novels before whittling their favourites down to a longlist of 12 or 13 titles, which will be unveiled in July. Of those, a shortlist of six will be announced next September and the winner will be crowned in November.
The Booker Prize is considered fiction’s most prestigious award and has been running for over 50 years. It is open to writers of any nationality as long as their novel is written in English and has been published in the U.K. and/or Ireland between Oct. 1, 2024 and Sept. 30 2025. Many Booker Prize winners go on to be adapted for screen.
The actress, an avid reader who has won four Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards for her roles on screen, has had her own literary imprint publisher for several years called SJP Lit.
She has also served as honorary chair of the American Library Association’s online reading resource platform Central Book Club, and as a board member of the US-based charity United for Libraries. In 2016, the actress announced she would bring out a line of books under the name SJP for publishers Hogarth.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said it is the first year to have three Booker authors – Adebayo, Reid and Doyle – on the panel.
Mentioning Parker, Ms Wood said she has enjoyed “sharing book recommendations” with the actress in the past few months, adding that she has “passionately supported contemporary fiction for many years”.
The prize was won this year by British author Samantha Harvey. She became the first woman since 2019 to win with her book Orbital, which is about astronauts looking down at Earth.
