Her Cosmopolitan-sipping, Manolo-wearing, wise-cracking Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was a generation-defining star turn. Now Sarah Jessica Parker has an unexpectedly cerebral new role, as a judge on next year’s Booker Prize.
Parker said it was “the thrill of a life” and “a golden ticket” to be appointed to the 2025 panel, which will be chaired by former winner Roddy Doyle. The actor, who earlier this year appeared on the London stage in the play Plaza Suite, has been quietly embedded in the literary world since becoming an editorial director at Hogarth in 2017, launching her own imprint, SJP Lit, with the independent publisher Zando in 2022.
Novelist Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the 2019 Booker for her novel Girl, Woman, Other, welcomed the appointment for its ability to “hopefully draw attention to and even expand the audience for literary fiction”. She added that “an ideal Booker judge was someone who was extremely well-read and passionate about novels, and open to a wide range of original voices and different cultures.” Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, described Parker this week as an “incredible supporter of contemporary fiction” whose reading recommendations were frequently “ahead of the game or ahead of the Booker”.
Parker brings Oscar-night stardust to London’s 55-year-old premier literary prize. A wardrobe that includes custom-made Chanel, vintage Vivienne Westwood and a towering Dolce & Gabbana golden crown featuring a miniature nativity scene, worn to the Met Ball, will up the ante at a ceremony not generally known for its fashion moments.
The book industry has come to appreciate the power of celebrity ever since Oprah’s book club proved famous readers such as Winfrey to have vastly more leverage over the fiction-buying book club than traditional reviewers. The hardcover edition of one of her picks, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, sold 149,500 copies, while the Oprah-endorsed paperback sold 2.7m. Smart celebrities now routinely add intellectual depth to their personal brands by sharing their highbrow reading tastes on social media. Cindy Crawford’s supermodel daughter Kaia Gerber and the singer Dua Lipa both curate online book clubs, with Gerber waxing lyrical about Plato and Eve Babitz and Lipa recommending Sylvia Plath and Gabriel García Márquez.
Parker’s Booker journey began on New Year’s Eve 2022, when she commented “Oh let me try!!!” under a Booker prize Instagram post describing the task of reading between 150 and 170 books – some of them several times – that the job requires. Parker said this week that she did not think her request would be taken seriously. “I would never be so bold.” she told the New York Times.
Accusations of dumbing down have long been a subplot of the Booker narrative. In 2011, a panel chaired by Dame Stella Rimington sparked outrage by naming “readability” and prose that could “zip along” as among the qualities they were looking for. Fleur Sinclair, the president of the Booksellers Association, welcomed Parker’s power to “raise the profile” of the prize. “Anyone high-profile championing reading and books, or any conversation that puts the enormous value of books and reading into the minds of as many people as possible is a good thing,” she said.
Publisher Juliet Mabey, whose independent Oneworld house has had a hat-trick of Booker wins with authors Paul Beatty, Paul Lynch and Marlon James, and who once described literary prizes as “posh bingo”, told the Guardian that the Booker’s catholic tastes in judges was a strength of the prize. “The Booker picks judges to reflect a range of backgrounds, from authors, literary critics, actors, artists, musicians and other people with a passion for reading and often a public presence.” Mabey noted that other literary prizes rely on the same judges each year “and publishers learn their tastes and submit accordingly, which can result in a very narrow range of prize winners. With the Booker Prize, so often the winner is a complete surprise, and that is one of the things that makes it so special.”
Gaby Wood noted that the emotional intelligence of actors, developed through reading scripts gave them an ear for dialogue and an appreciation of how character is formed on the page, and is an asset to a judging panel. Justine Jordan, the Guardian’s fiction editor and herself a judge of the 2024 Booker Prize, noted that the ability to work collectively, learned on set and on stage, lent itself to the “collegiality” important to working toward joint decisions. “What really matters is the mix of judges, the alchemy of five minds coming together. This year’s panel was also informed by other creative practices. Nitin Sawhney hears music when he reads and Edmund de Waal was inspired by certain books to go and make pots,” Jordan observed. For each individual judge, being “both a generous and a rigorous reader, and eager to put the hundreds of hours in” was essential, she added.
Carrie Bradshaw, Parker’s alter-ego on Sex And The City, framed the actor as chick-lit adjacent, but as executive producer on the sequel And Just Like That, she worked with publishing houses to give a platform to young novelists by featuring their books on screen. Bradshaw appeared in one episode reading Who They Was, Gabriel Krauze’s Booker-longlisted semi-autobiographical novel about complex identities set in London gangland. Talking to Goodreads in 2017 about what she hoped to accomplish in her then-new role in publishing, Parker said that “literary fiction deserves caretaking … and the stories and authors I’m looking for tend to be global voices about unknown places, cultures, faiths.”
Parker said this week that, as a Booker judge, “my assumption is that we’re going to talk about books we love because they touched us, they made us feel things”. Authors hoping to make the grade will find clues to her taste on social media, where she recently posted a photograph of a suitcase stuffed with holiday reading, which included the forthcoming Flesh by David Szalay, described by writer William Boyd as “mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise”, and Havoc by Christopher Bollen, a Luxor-set thriller of Highsmithian sophistication with an unreliable narrator. “I can get toothpaste and moisturiser anywhere,” Parker wrote in the caption.
Carrie Bradshaw established Parker’s status in popular culture as an icon of modern womanhood. Literary fiction, once macho territory presided over by big beasts in the form of established male novelists, has become a more feminine landscape, with female authors featured prominently on prize lists. Women now make up 80% of consumers of fiction. Alina Grabowski’s novel Women and Children First, weaving 10 women’s perspectives to explore the impact of a teenage girl’s death in a Massachusetts small town, was the first title published by SJP Lit. Grabowski credited Parker’s support with “opening up a whole audience that I don’t know if I would have had access to otherwise”.
Movie stardom has long been a stepping stone to other careers for men, from Clint Eastwood’s jump to directing to Ronald Reagan’s elevation to the White House – but until now, fewer female actors have made equivalent progress. Kate Winslet spoke recently about feeling that she was “letting other women down” by not becoming a director, and planned to “change the culture”. In establishing an identity as a literary authority, Parker mirrors the playbook of Reese Witherspoon, who has made a popular book club part of a media empire that also includes a successful production company.
Actors who have previously joined the panel include Fiona Shaw, Olivia Williams and Joanna Lumley, who stirred controversy when, in 1985, she opposed the panel’s decision to crown Keri Hulme’s The Bone People as winner, calling the subject matter “indefensible” and absenting herself from the final meeting. Lumley later said of the experience that “the so-called bitchy world of acting was a Brownie’s tea party compared with the piranha-infested waters of publishing.”
