New ‘Hunger Games’ Novel Coming in 2025 from Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Courtesy of Murray Close/Lionsgate

Author Suzanne Collins is returning to the world of Panem.

Collins and her publisher Scholastic on Thursday announced that a new installment in The Hunger Games series will be released next year.

The new book — the fifth in the series — will be called Sunrise on the Reaping, and is set for release March 18, 2025.

Sunrise will take place 24 years before the events of the first novel The Hunger Games, “starting on the morning of the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell,” per Scholastic. Those Games are noteworthy given that the victor was Haymitch Abernathy, the only winner from District 12 prior to Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark’s dual win 24 years later. Haymitch, who like all victors went on to become a mentor to tributes from his district, was played by Woody Harrelson in the Hunger Games adaptations.

No film rights were announced in conjunction with the book, but all of the previous installments in the series have been adapted into feature films by Lionsgate. The last film in the series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, grossed nearly $340 million at the box office last year.

The original four installments of the series, starring Jennifer Lawrence, earned nearly $3 billion at the box office.

“With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’” Collins said in a statement. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

“Suzanne Collins has done it again, bringing us back to the world of Panem in order to ask us important questions about our own world,” added Ellie Berger, president of Scholastic Trade. “Sunrise on the Reaping is a remarkable book, bringing new complexity, perspective, and revelations to a piece of the Hunger Games story that readers have longed to know more about.”