SOLENOID longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
The International Booker Prize 2025 longlist. © Yuki Sugiura for the Booker Prize Foundation
LONDON, ENGLAND—Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter, originally published by Deep Vellum in 2022 and published by Pushkin Press in the UK in July 2024, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for the finest single work of fiction around the world which has been translated into English and published in the UK and or/Ireland. The prize celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator. In addition, the shortlisted authors and translators each receive £2,500. The longlist was announced on February 25, 2025, highlighting 13 books translated from 10 original languages.
Solenoid is the first book written by a Romanian author to ever appear on the International Booker Prize longlist. The winner of the Dublin Literary Award 2024 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2022, this highly-acclaimed masterwork of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding, is based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher. Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly “goes the way of the oceanic” (Los Angeles Review of Books), spiraling into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel “subtly mocks the elements of autofiction and history fiction by way of science fiction” (Astra Magazine)—Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript. Cărtărescu, declared the New York Times, “plays both critic and apologist throughout, a delicious dialectic whose final, ravishing synthesis exists in the towering work of Solenoid itself.”
“Translated fiction is not an elite or rarefied cultural space requiring expert knowledge; it is the exact opposite,” says Max Porter, bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author and chair of this year’s International Booker Prize judging panel. “It is stories of every conceivable kind from everywhere, for everyone. I hope this year’s selection will exhilarate and engage a worldwide community of readers.” Porter is joined on the panel 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.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday, 8 April. The winning title will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, 20 May.
Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publishing house and literary arts organization with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. Founded in 2013 in Dallas, TX, Deep Vellum has expanded to encompass six distinct publishing imprints and is now the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States.
Solenoid was published in the U.S. on October 25, 2022. It is available to order from Deep Vellum, Bookshop.org, or your local independent bookstore. A Solenoid Reader is also available as a free companion download.