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.
Peter Philip Carey AO is an Australian novelist.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
David John Lodge CBE FRSL is an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge has also written television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T. S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View, The Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue, beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
The Dundee International Book Prize was awarded from 2000 to 2016. It billed itself as the UK's premier prize for debut novelists. It included a £5,000 cash award. The annual award was for an unpublished debut novel on any theme and in any genre, written in the English language. The Dundee International Book Prize was a joint venture between Dundee – One City, Many Discoveries and the University of Dundee. Entrants were worldwide. The prize was published by Birlinn from 2000 till 2010, with Cargo taking over from 2011 to 2014, and Freight Books from 2014 to 2016.
The Man Asian Literary Prize was an annual literary award between 2007 and 2012, given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year. It is awarded to writers who are citizens or residents of one of the following 34 Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, The Maldives, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam. Submissions are invited through publishers who are entitled to each submit two novels by August 31 each year. Entry forms are available from May.
Andrew Murray Scott is a novelist, poet and non-fiction book writer. His first novel, Tumulus, appeared in 2000, as the winner of the inaugural Dundee International Book Prize for unpublished novels, against 82 other manuscripts, winning the author £6,000 plus a publishing deal. A second novel, Estuary Blue, appeared in 2001 from the same publisher, Polygon, of Edinburgh. In 2007, a third novel, The Mushroom Club, appeared and Scott's fourth novel, The Big J published by Steve Savage Publishers Ltd, was published in April 2008 while a fifth novel In A Dead Man's Jacket, was published as an ebook in 2012. In 2019, Andrew published the first of a series of Scottish political conspiracy thrillers featuring freelance journalist Willie Morton, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Andrew-Scott/e/B07MQCTK9K/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1. Deadly Secrecy appeared under a shortened version of his name: Andrew Scott, and this was followed by 'Scotched Nation', in 2020 by 'Oblivion's Ghost' and in 2021, 'Sovereign Cause'.
Jacob M. Appel is an American polymath, author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. He is the director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he practices emergency psychiatry at the adjoining Mount Sinai Health System. Appel is the subject of the 2019 documentary film Jacob by director Jon Stahl.
Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan writer. He grew up in Colombo, studied in New Zealand and has lived and worked in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. His 2010 debut novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew won the Commonwealth Book Prize, the DSC Prize, the Gratiaen Prize and was adjudged the second greatest cricket book of all time by Wisden. His third novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was announced as the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize on 17 October 2022.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2012.
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.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2013.
The Rubery International Book Award is the largest cash award for books published by independent publishers and self published authors in Great Britain. The London Review of Books described it as "independent publishing's response to the Booktrust and the Orange Prize. The Alliance of Independent Authors describes the award as: 'holders of the respected Rubery Award [...] should be considered to have a quality endorsement.'
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.
The Vegetarian is a South Korean three-part novel written by Han Kang and first published in 2007. Based on Han's 1997 short story "The Fruit of My Woman", The Vegetarian is set in modern-day Seoul and tells the story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and home-maker, whose decision to stop eating meat after a bloody nightmare about human cruelty leads to devastating consequences in her personal and familial life.
Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who translates works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. With the author Olga Tokarczuk, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights. In 2020, she was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her autofictional memoir Homesick.
