The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Tom Ripley is a fictional character in the Ripley series of crime novels by American novelist Patricia Highsmith, as well as several film adaptations. He is a career criminal, con artist, and serial killer who always gets away with his crimes. The five novels in which he appears—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water—were published between 1955 and 1991. In every novel, he comes perilously close to getting caught or killed, but ultimately escapes danger.
Leslie Feinberg was an American butch lesbian, transgender activist, communist, and author. Feinberg authored Stone Butch Blues in 1993. Her writing, notably Stone Butch Blues and her pioneering non-fiction book Transgender Warriors (1996), laid the groundwork for much of the terminology and awareness around gender studies and was instrumental in bringing these issues to a more mainstream audience.
Sonya Louise Hartnett is an Australian author of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. She has been called "the finest Australian writer of her generation". For her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" Hartnett won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, the biggest prize in children's literature.
Rona Munro is a Scottish writer. She has written plays for theatre, radio, and television. Her film work includes Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Oranges and Sunshine (2010) for Jim Loach and Aimée & Jaguar (1999), co-authored by German director Max Färberböck. Munro is the second cousin of Scottish author Angus MacVicar.
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Kitty Aldridge is a British actress and writer.
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Iain Macwhirter is a Scottish political journalist. He is a political commentator for several newspapers, an author and documentary film and radio presenter and a former Rector of Edinburgh University. He has worked at both the UK Parliament and Scottish Parliament, presenting the BBC2 programmes Westminster Live, Scrutiny and, from 1999, the BBC TV programme Holyrood Live from the Scottish Parliament.
Alasdair James Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.
Monique Pauline Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Meike Ziervogel is a German novelist, publisher, and journalist now based in London. She and her self-founded publishing, Peirene Press, have received multiple award nominations and accolades from notable European news agencies. She continues to write while supporting charitable work to aid Middle Eastern refugee women and children.
Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer.
Freight Books was an independent publisher based in Glasgow. It published books for an English speaking readership, including award-winning literary fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction and humour. Freight Books was named Scotland's Publisher of the Year 2015 by the Saltire Society. Freight Books published the debut novel of Martin Cathcart Froden, the winner of the 2015 Dundee International Book Prize.
Kirsty Logan is a Scottish writer.
Boys in the Trees is a memoir by American singer-songwriter Carly Simon.
Kirstin Innes is a Scottish novelist and journalist.
The Not the Booker Prize is an annual literary award presented the The Guardian. To be eligible for the Prize, books must meet all criteria for the Booker Prize. Eligible books are nominated and voted on by Guardian readers to select a shortlist. After the shortlist is selected, the books are debated on the Guardian books blog in the following weeks, and the winner is selected both by reader votes and a panel of judges.
