The Booker Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Booker–McConnell Prize (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom. The winner of the Booker Prize is generally assured international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade. From its inception, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2018 Powers has published twelve novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford Universities. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
Michael Frayn, FRSL is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. He has also written philosophical works, such as The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe (2006).
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.
Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
Thomas Archibald Barron is an American writer of fantasy literature, books for children and young adults, and nature books.
Indian English literature (IEL) is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao who contributed to Indian fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who are of Indian descent.
The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35, who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Each year the awards total £20,000, with one author receiving a larger prize amount, called the "Prize", and the remainder given to one or more other writers, called the "Awards". The award was established in 1984 by the Society of Authors, at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels. The awards are given to traditional or romantic novels, rather than those of an experimental style, and can be for published or unpublished works.
Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.In January 2015, The Economic Times, India's leading business publication, listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
Nicholas Francis Ward Earls is a novelist from Brisbane, Australia, who writes humorous popular fiction about everyday life. The majority of his novels are set in his home town of Brisbane, which has given him a high local profile. He fronted a major Brisbane tourism campaign.
Narayan Desai was an Indian Gandhian and author.
Nadeem Aslam FRSL is a prize-winning British Pakistani novelist. His debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds, won the Betty Trask and the Author's Club First Novel Award. His critically acclaimed second novel Maps for Lost Lovers won Encore Award and Kiriyama Prize; it was shortlisted for International Dublin Literary Award, among others. Colm Tóibín described him as "one of the most exciting and serious British novelists writing now".
The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Man Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007, and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award.
Roger McDonald is the award-winning author of several novels and a number of non-fiction works. He is also an accomplished poet and TV scriptwriter.
Ibrahim Nasrallah, the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were evicted from their land in Palestine in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in a refugee camp in Jordan, and began his career as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked in the media and cultural sectors till 2006 when he dedicated his life to writing. To date, he has published 15 poetry collections, 21 novels, and several other books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Comedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one; to date 12 novels have been published in the framework of this project. Five of his novels and a volume of poetry have been published in English, four works in Italian, and one novel in Danish, Turkish, and Persian.
Aravind Adiga is an Indo-Australian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
Kishwar Desai is an Indian author and columnist. She is also the Chair of The Arts And Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT) which has just set up the world's first Partition Museum at Town Hall, Amritsar, Punjab, India. This is a not-for-profit Trust, an NGO, that has created the Museum through donations from people—Partition survivors and their families, as well as corporates and donors. The Museum is only five minutes away from the Golden Temple and Jallianwala Bagh. The building was recently completed and inaugurated by the Chief Minister of Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh on Partition Remembrance Day, 17 August 2017.
ZigZag Street is a fictional novel written by Australian writer, Nick Earls. It was published in 1996. It was Earl's second novel and won the Betty Trask Award in 1998. It has been compared with the work of Nick Hornby.
