Sarah Jessica Parker, best known for her role as columnist and fashionista Carrie Bradshaw in the TV series Sex and the City, will be a judge for The Booker Prize 2025, her publishing house SJP Lit announced on Thursday.
Much like her Sex and the City character Carrie Bradshaw’s passion for storytelling and her thoughtful musings on life and relationships, Parker, who is the winner of one Emmy and four Golden Globes, is adding another milestone to her career.
Parker will be joined by Nigerian novelist Ayobami Adebayo, British writer and literary critic Chris Power, and American author Kiley Reid on the panel of Booker 2024 judges. While Ayobami Adebayo was shortlisted for the Booker for his novel A Spell of Good Things last year, Kiley Reid was shortlisted for the same for her novel Such a Fun Age in 2020. The jury will be led by Irish author Roddy Doyle, who won the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
The judging duty for the Booker prize is “very daunting” for Parker, who told The New York Times that she thinks of judges “as academics, learned, experienced in ways I’m just not”.
“I didn’t pursue higher education. I don’t have any degrees,” Parker said, adding that she felt like an “interloper” who constantly found herself in a position to “prove herself” when she explored the field of publishing.
The 59-year-old actress has been involved in the publishing industry in recent years. She was the editorial director at SJP for Hogarth, a Penguin Random House imprint, before launching her own publishing house SJP Lit in collaboration with independent publisher Zando in 2023.
Recent titles published by SJP Lit include They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar, Alina Grabowski’s Women and Children First, Elysha Chang’s A Quitter’s Paradise and Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote.
The Booker judging duty comes at a time when Parker is on a break from filming. “I will carve out every moment I can,” she told The New York Times, adding that she is feeling “pretty optimistic about being able to do it”.
Parker was last seen in the second season of And Just Like That…, a reboot of HBO’s Sex and the City, which shows the then 30-something women finding their way through their 50s. A third season of the show is currently in the works. Parker also appeared in the fantasy comedy film Hocus Pocus in 2022, directed by Anne Fletcher.
