Booker Prize

(also the Man Booker Prize)

a prize that is given each autumn for the best novel by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland that year. The judging is organized by Book Trust, and the prize was first given by Booker, a large food company, in 1968. Since 2002 the Man Group has provided the money for the prize, which is £50 000.

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in full (2002– ) Man Booker Prize

Prestigious British award given annually to a full-length novel.

It was established in 1968 by the multinational company Booker McConnell as a counterpart to the French Prix Goncourt. The Booker Prize Foundation administers the prize, aided by an advisory committee. Entries, which are nominated by publishers, must be written by an English-language author from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth countries, Ireland, or South Africa. Its winners have included Kingsley Amis, A.S. Byatt, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Salman Rushdie. In 1992 a Booker Russian Novel Prize was introduced.

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▪ British literary award

in full  Man Booker Prize , formerly  Booker McConnell Prize 

      prestigious British award given annually to a full-length novel; those eligible include English-language writers from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth countries, and the Republic of Ireland.

      Booker McConnell, a multinational company, established the award in 1968 to provide a counterpart to the Prix Goncourt in France. The prize was the subject of controversy on several occasions, and in 1984 Salman Rushdie (Rushdie, Sir Salman), the winner of the prize in 1981 for his novel Midnight's Children, described the judging committee as “Killjoyces” and “Anti-Prousts” after the committee chairman stated that he had not read the fiction of James Joyce (Joyce, James) and Marcel Proust (Proust, Marcel) and did not want to award the prize to writers like them. (Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers [1993] and the Best of the Booker [2008] prizes when they were given in celebration of the prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries, respectively.) The award was administered by the Book Trust until 2002, when oversight passed to the Man Group PLC, an investment management firm. Well-known recipients of the prize include V.S. Naipaul (Naipaul, Sir V.S.), Nadine Gordimer (Gordimer, Nadine), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer), Iris Murdoch (Murdoch, Dame Iris), J.M. Coetzee (Coetzee, J.M.), A.S. Byatt (Byatt, A.S.), Kingsley Amis (Amis, Sir Kingsley), Penelope Lively (Lively, Penelope), Ben Okri (Okri, Ben), Michael Ondaatje (Ondaatje, Michael), Ian McEwan (McEwan, Ian), Peter Carey (Carey, Peter), and Kiran Desai (Desai, Kiran).

      In 1992 the Booker Russian Novel Prize was set up to reward contemporary Russian authors, to stimulate wider knowledge of modern Russian fiction, and to encourage translation and publication of Russian fiction outside Russia. The Man Booker International Prize, awarded every two years, was established in 2005.

       Booker Prize winners Booker Prize winnersWinners of the Booker Prize are provided in the table.

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