Hollywood actress Sarah Jessica Parker, known for her lead role in “Sex and the City”, will be a judge on the 2025 panel for the prestigious Booker Prize, the organizers announced Tuesday. The jury will be chaired by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who himself won the literary award for fiction in 1993 with his novel “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha”. Parker, who played Carrie Bradshaw in the TV series “Sex and the City”, will be joined by Nigerian novelist Ayobami Adebayo, British writer and literary critic Chris Power and American author Kiley Reid. The 59-year-old actress, who has one Emmy and four Golden Globes to her name, has been quietly making a name for herself in the publishing industry in recent years.

She was editorial director of a subsidiary of publishing house Penguin, before launching her own literary imprint, SJP Lit, in 2023, in partnership with an independent publisher. The chance to be part of the jury is “very daunting” but also “the thrill of a life”, Parker told The New York Times. “I think of judges as academics, learned, experienced in ways I’m just not. I didn’t pursue higher education. I don’t have any degrees,” the star added. 

hief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood, said Parker “has passionately supported contemporary fiction for many years”. “The 2025 judges form a jury of creative peers like no other,” Wood added.

Authors and publishers can already send their submissions for the 2025 Bookers. A longlist of 12 or 13 novels in July will be whittled down to the finalists in September, with the winner announced in November 2025. Created in 1969, the Booker prize is awarded each year to the “best sustained work of fiction written in English”, and is seen as a talent-spotter for lesser known authors. It has contributed to the success of literary greats including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and even the 2024 literature Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, who won the Booker in 2016 with “The Vegetarian”. The winner in this year’s women-dominated pool was British writer Samantha Harvey for her novel “Orbital”. — AFP