As another option, you can do look ups like:

class UserAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = (..., 'get_author')
    
    def get_author(self, obj):
        return obj.book.author
    get_author.short_description = 'Author'
    get_author.admin_order_field = 'book__author'

Since Django 3.2 you can use display() decorator:

class UserAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = (..., 'get_author')
    
    @display(ordering='book__author', description='Author')
    def get_author(self, obj):
        return obj.book.author

For Django >= 3.2

The proper way to do it with Django 3.2 or higher is by using the display decorator

class BookAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    model = Book
    list_display = ['title', 'get_author_name']

    @admin.display(description='Author Name', ordering='author__name')
    def get_author_name(self, obj):
        return obj.author.name

According to the documentation, you can only display the __unicode__ representation of a ForeignKey:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#list-display

Seems odd that it doesn't support the 'book__author' style format which is used everywhere else in the DB API.

Turns out there's a ticket for this feature, which is marked as Won't Fix.

You can show whatever you want in list display by using a callable. It would look like this:

def book_author(object):
  return object.book.author

class PersonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  list_display = [book_author,]

This one's already accepted, but if there are any other dummies out there (like me) that didn't immediately get it from the presently accepted answer, here's a bit more detail.

The model class referenced by the ForeignKey needs to have a __unicode__ method within it, like here:

class Category(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

That made the difference for me, and should apply to the above scenario. This works on Django 1.0.2.

I may be late, but this is another way to do it. You can simply define a method in your model and access it via the list_display as below:

models.py

class Person(models.Model):
    book = models.ForeignKey(Book, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    def get_book_author(self):
        return self.book.author

admin.py

class PersonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('get_book_author',)

But this and the other approaches mentioned above add two extra queries per row in your listview page. To optimize this, we can override the get_queryset to annotate the required field, then use the annotated field in our ModelAdmin method

admin.py

from django.db.models.expressions import F

@admin.register(models.Person)
class PersonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('get_author',)
    def get_queryset(self, request):
        queryset = super().get_queryset(request)
        queryset = queryset.annotate(
            _author = F('book__author')
        )
        return queryset

    @admin.display(ordering='_author', description='Author')
    def get_author(self, obj):
        return obj._author

AlexRobbins' answer worked for me, except that the first two lines need to be in the model (perhaps this was assumed?), and should reference self:

def book_author(self):
  return self.book.author

Then the admin part works nicely.