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.
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.
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Chairing next year’s panel, Doyle, who won the award for his book Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, said: “For more than 40 years, I’ve been writing novels, or editing novels, or thinking about the next novel.
“For longer still – since my mother taught me how to read – I’ve filled hours of every day with novels, reading them, re-reading them, just gazing at them.
“To have licence to do little else but read the year’s best novels, to find the familiar in the unfamiliar, to examine the remarkable, unique things that great writers can do with the shared language, English – I can’t wait.
“I’m looking forward to working with a great panel of judges. I’ve never been in a book club before, but I think I’m probably joining a good one.”
The longlist of 12 to 13 books will be announced next July, with the shortlist of six books to follow in September.
