The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a 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 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Peter Philip Carey AO is an Australian novelist. Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Carey is one of only five writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang. In May 2008 he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize.
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a personal memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Mohammed Hanif is a British Pakistani writer and journalist who writes a monthly opinion piece in The New York Times.
The Best of the Booker is a special prize awarded in commemoration of the Booker Prize's 40th anniversary. Eligible books included the 41 winners of the Booker Prize since its inception in 1968. The six shortlisted titles were announced on 12 May 2008 and were chosen by novelist Victoria Glendinning, broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and Professor of English at University College London John Mullan. Among the nominees were the only two authors at that time to have won the Booker twice, Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee, nominated for their novels Oscar & Lucinda (1988) and Disgrace (1999) respectively.
Adam Samuel James Foulds FRSL is a British novelist and poet.
Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world's most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.
Summertime is a 2009 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. It is the third in a series of fictionalized memoirs by Coetzee and details the life of one John Coetzee from the perspective of five people who have known him. The novel largely takes place in the mid to late 1970s, largely in Cape Town, although there are also important scenes in more remote South African settings. While there are obvious similarities between the actual writer of the novel, J. M. Coetzee, and the subject of the novel, John Coetzee, there are some differences - most notably that the John Coetzee of the novel is reported as having died. Within the novel, the opinions and thoughts of the five people are compiled and interpreted by a fictitious biographer, who also adds fragments from John Coetzee's notebooks. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize. Coetzee was already a two-time winner of the award and it is for this reason that literary commentator Merritt Moseley believes he did not win it for Summertime.
The Lost Man Booker Prize was a special edition of the Man Booker Prize awarded by a public vote in 2010 to a novel from 1970 as the books published in 1970 were not eligible for the Man Booker Prize due to a rules alteration; until 1970 the prize was awarded to books published in the previous year, while from 1971 onwards it was awarded to books published the same year as the award. The prize was won by J. G. Farrell for Troubles.
Sunjeev Sahota is a British novelist whose first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in January 2011 and whose second novel, The Year of the Runaways, was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature in 2017.
Maria Joan Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Hyland is a lecturer in creative writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Prize.
Bring Up the Bodies is an historical novel by Hilary Mantel; sequel to the award-winning Wolf Hall; and part of a trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. It won the 2012 Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. The final novel in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was published in March 2020.
The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.
The Rathbones Folio Prize, previously known as the Folio Prize and The Literature Prize, is a literary award that was sponsored by the London-based publisher The Folio Society for its first two years, 2014–2015. Starting in 2017 the sponsor is Rathbone Investment Management.
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer. He is best known for writing the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in their respective years of publication. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages.
The Golden Man Booker was a special one-off prize awarded in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Booker Prize. All of the previous 51 winning titles since the Booker's inception in 1969 were eligible.
Oyinkan Braithwaite is a Nigerian-British novelist and writer. She was born in Lagos and spent her childhood in both Nigeria and the UK.
Quichotte is a 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie. It is his fourteenth novel, published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel Don Quixote, Quichotte is a metafiction that tells the story of an addled Indian-American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become obsessed.
The 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction was announced on 19 November 2020. The Booker longlist of 13 books was announced on 27 July, and was narrowed down to a shortlist of six on 15 September. The Prize was awarded to Douglas Stuart for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, receiving £50,000. Stuart is the second Scottish author to win the Booker Prize, after it was awarded to James Kelman for How Late It Was, How Late in 1994. The ceremony was hosted by John Wilson at the Roundhouse in Central London, and broadcast by the BBC. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortlisted authors and guest speakers appeared virtually from their respective homes.
The 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction was announced on 3 November 2021, during a ceremony at the BBC Radio Theatre. The longlist was announced on 27 July 2021. The shortlist was announced on 14 September 2021. The Prize was awarded to Damon Galgut for his novel, The Promise, receiving £50,000. He is the third South African to win the prize, after J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.
