LONDON — Novelist Kiran Desai is back in the running for the Booker Prize with her forthcoming work The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. If she wins, she will become only the fifth double winner in the 56-year history of the Award.

The 2025 Booker Prize honors fiction in English published in the U.K. and/or Ireland between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025. This year’s longlist of 13 novels, announced on July 29, features writers of nine nationalities, including Susan Choi, Tash Aw, and Desai.

According to the judges its “an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity,” the 677-page novel will be released on September 23. It follows Sonia, an aspiring novelist who returns to India from Vermont fearing a dark spell, and Sunny, a struggling journalist in New York., the narrative evolves from a story about Indians in America to one about westernized Indians rediscovering their homeland—and explores the Indian novel’s status in world literature.

Desai previously won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, which examined themes of migration, displacement, and identity. At 35, she was the youngest woman to win the award. Born in Delhi, Desai was educated in India, England, and the United States, and now lives in New York.

Other South Asian Booker winners include V.S. Naipaul (In a Free State), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), and Shehan Karunatilaka (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida), Banu mushtaq and deepa banshi for kannada translated book (heart lamps)

The 2025 Booker Prize winner, who will receive £50,000, will be announced on November 10.