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.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize, as the Booker Prize was then known, was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
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.
Damon Galgut is a South African novelist and playwright. He was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, having previously been shortlisted for the award in 2003 and 2010.
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her nine novels.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.
Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short story writer. She has written five novels and two short story collections, including Fates and Furies (2015), Florida (2018), Matrix (2022), and The Vaster Wilds (2023).
Andrés Neuman is an Argentine writer, poet, translator, columnist and blogger.
NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele, a Zimbabwean author. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. She was named one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2014. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, and her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her "the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker list twice".
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for London Review of Books.
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. She is best known for her bestselling novel A Little Life, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, and for being the editor-in-chief of T Magazine.
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer who wrote 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 30 languages.
Priestdaddy is a memoir by American poet Patricia Lockwood. It was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times and was awarded the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor. In 2019, the New York Times included the book on its list "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years," and The Guardian named it one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
Outline is a novel by Rachel Cusk, the first in a trilogy known as The Outline trilogy, which also contains the novels Transit and Kudos. It was chosen by The New York Times critics as one of the 15 remarkable books by women that are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." The New Yorker has called the novel "autobiographical fiction."
Brandon Taylor is an American writer. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa and has received several fellowships for his writing. His short stories and essays have been published in many outlets and have received critical acclaim. His debut novel, Real Life, came out in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Taylor's Filthy Animals won The Story Prize awarded annually to collections of short fiction.
Bewilderment is a 2021 novel by Richard Powers, published on September 21, 2021, by W. W. Norton & Company. It is Powers' thirteenth novel, his first since winning the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Overstory (2018).
Time Shelter is a 2020 novel by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov. In 2021, the Italian version of the novel, titled Cronorifugio and translated by Giuseppe Dell'Agata was awarded the Strega European Prize. In 2023, the English version of the novel, translated by Angela Rodel, became the first Bulgarian-language novel to both be nominated for and win the International Booker Prize. The £50,000 prize was equally shared between Gospodinov and Rodel.
The Booker Prize is an annual literary award given for the best English-language novel of the year published in either the United Kingdom or Ireland. The 2023 winner was Paul Lynch's Prophet Song.
