Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, and one of the most important literary awards in the English-speaking world. The Booker Prize was established in 1969 to reward outstanding literary achievement, raise the stature of authors with the reading public, and increase the sales of books. It is an annual award open to all writers within the Commonwealth, formerly sponsored by Booker plc, a multinational conglomerate. In 2002 sponsorship passed from Booker’s successor The Big Food Group plc to the investment and brokerage company Man Group plc, and organization and operation of the prize to a new registered charity, the Booker Prize Foundation. The prize is currently worth £65,000 (£50,000 for the winning author and £2,500 for each of the six shortlisted authors). Books that win the Booker Prize, as well as those that are selected for the shortlist, usually experience a considerable increase in their sales.

A panel, usually of five judges, and made up of prominent critics, authors, publishers, and academics, draws up a shortlist from which a winner is then chosen. The choice of novels, for the shortlist and the prize itself, is often hotly debated, and the occasional controversies between the judges, as well as live television coverage of the award ceremony, have given the award considerable publicity in recent years. In 1995 a record 137 titles were entered for the prize, and the winner was chosen from a shortlist of five; the shortlist has traditionally consisted of six books, but on this occasion the judges decided that no other book was of sufficient quality to compete with the books they had chosen. Previous winners include Kingsley Amis, J. M. Coetzee, William Golding, and Salman Rushdie. Rushdie gained the distinction of winning the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993; his Midnight's Children, the 1981 winner, was considered the best prize-winning novel of the competition’s first 25 years.

A new, biennial award, the Man Booker International Prize, was created in 2004 to recognize, in the words of the organizers, “one writer's achievement in literature and their significant influence on writers and readers worldwide”. The new prize is open to authors of any nationality as long as their work is published in English. The first winner was the Albanian poet and novelist Ismail Kadaré (2005); the second award went to the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (2007). Man Group plc is also the sponsor of the Man Asian Literary Prize, which seeks to bring Asian authors to world attention. The prize, for an Asian novel unpublished in English, was first awarded in 2007; the inaugural winner was Wolf Totem by the Chinese author Jiang Rong.