Booker Prize

Based on Wikipedia: Booker Prize

In 1972, the Marxist art critic John Berger stood up at the Booker Prize ceremony and did something extraordinary. He'd just won Britain's most prestigious literary award for his novel G., and instead of graciously accepting the honor, he launched into a blistering attack on the very company handing him the money. Booker McConnell, he declared, had built its fortune on 130 years of Caribbean sugar production—an industry inextricable from colonialism and exploitation. Then he announced he was giving half his prize money to the British Black Panther movement.

The audience sat in stunned silence. This was supposed to be a celebration of literary achievement, not a political reckoning.

But that's the Booker Prize in a nutshell. For over fifty years, it has been the most contentious, dramatic, and influential literary award in the English-speaking world. Judges have stormed out calling winning books "crap." Authors have refused to attend unless guaranteed victory in advance. One year, the jury simply broke the rules and gave the prize to two people, despite explicit warnings not to do so.

The Booker Prize matters because it can transform an author's life overnight. The winner receives fifty thousand pounds—a substantial sum, but almost incidental compared to what really counts. Winning the Booker virtually guarantees bestseller status. When Samantha Harvey won in 2024 for Orbital, a quiet, meditative novel set on a space station, it sold over twenty thousand copies in the United Kingdom in the week following the announcement. That made it the fastest-selling Booker winner since records began.

How the Prize Began

The story starts in 1969 with a company called Booker, McConnell Ltd. The firm had made its money in colonial enterprises—sugar plantations, food distribution, various commercial ventures across the British Empire and its successor states. By the late 1960s, the company was looking for ways to improve its public image, and sponsoring a literary prize seemed like an elegant solution.

Three men were instrumental in getting it off the ground: Jock Campbell, Charles Tyrrell, and Tom Maschler. The first ceremony took place on April 22, 1969, at Drapers' Hall on Throgmorton Street in the City of London. The prize money was five thousand pounds—a meaningful sum at the time, equivalent to perhaps forty or fifty thousand pounds today.

P. H. Newby won that first award for Something to Answer For. The judges included the formidable literary critic Rebecca West and the poet Stephen Spender. From the beginning, the prize was meant to be serious, prestigious, and a genuine honor.

The following year, 1970, Bernice Rubens became the first woman to win, for The Elected Member. This was just the beginning of a rich history of female winners, though it would be decades before the prize achieved anything approaching gender balance.

The Rules That Weren't Quite Rules

One of the peculiarities of the Booker has always been its eligibility requirements, which have shifted over the years in ways that sparked genuine controversy.

Originally, only novels written by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe were eligible. This meant British, Australian, Canadian, Indian, Nigerian, and Irish writers could compete—but Americans could not. The logic was that the prize would champion literature from the broader English-speaking world that might otherwise be overshadowed by the dominant American publishing industry.

In 2014, the rules changed dramatically. Suddenly, any novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland could win, regardless of the author's nationality. This meant Americans could finally compete.

The reaction was fierce.

Former winner A. S. Byatt worried the prize risked "diluting its identity." Some argued that American writers already had plenty of major prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award—and didn't need to dominate yet another. Others welcomed the change as a natural evolution for an increasingly globalized literary world.

The fears proved partially founded. Paul Beatty became the first American winner in 2016, and George Saunders won the following year. By 2018, British publishers were lobbying to reverse the change, arguing that the inclusion of American writers would lead to "homogenisation"—everyone chasing the same big names, reducing the diversity of voices that got attention.

The Drama of the Judges

Every year, the Booker Prize Foundation appoints a panel of five judges. These aren't just literary critics—the panels have included authors, publishers, journalists, politicians, actors, artists, and musicians. The diversity is intentional. The prize has always wanted to reflect broad cultural taste, not just academic literary judgment.

But putting five opinionated people in a room and asking them to agree on the single best novel of the year is a recipe for conflict.

In 1980, Anthony Burgess—author of A Clockwork Orange—was nominated for Earthly Powers. He refused to attend the ceremony unless someone told him in advance whether he'd won. The judges apparently couldn't decide until just thirty minutes before the event, eventually giving the prize to William Golding for Rites of Passage. Both novels had been considered favorites, and the dramatic "literary battle" between two senior writers made front-page news.

In 1983, the judging for the award produced an actual tie between J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K and Salman Rushdie's Shame. The chair of judges, Fay Weldon, had to make the final call. According to reports, she initially chose Rushdie—then changed her mind while the result was literally being phoned through. Coetzee won.

At the ceremony, Weldon used her speech to attack the publishers in attendance, accusing them of exploiting authors. "I will ask you if in your dealings with authors you are really being fair, and honourable, and right?" she demanded. "Or merely getting away with what you can? If you are not careful, you will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs."

This was not the decorous literary event the sponsors had imagined.

The 1994 Scandal

Perhaps no Booker decision has provoked more outrage than the 1994 prize, awarded to James Kelman for How Late It Was, How Late.

The novel is written almost entirely in Glaswegian dialect, stream-of-consciousness style, following a working-class man who wakes up blind after a police beating. It's an extraordinary literary achievement—but also a challenging read, full of profanity and deliberately difficult to parse for anyone unfamiliar with Scottish vernacular.

One of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, called the decision "a disgrace" and walked out of the ceremony. She later described the book as "crap." The marketing manager at WHSmith, one of Britain's largest booksellers, called it "an embarrassment to the whole book trade." The Glasgow branch of Waterstones sold just thirteen copies in the week after the announcement.

The Guardian's literary editor, Richard Gott, used the occasion to question the entire enterprise. The prize, he wrote, was "a significant and dangerous iceberg in the sea of British culture that serves as a symbol of its current malaise." What did it mean for a literary award to champion a book that most readers found impenetrable? Was this an act of cultural courage or cultural irrelevance?

Kelman, for his part, remained unapologetic. His novel was a serious work of art, and if it made some people uncomfortable, that was rather the point.

The Accusation of Insider Politics

In 1996, the Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy served as a Booker judge. Five years later, she gave an interview that cast the entire process in an unflattering light.

The prize, she declared, was "a pile of crooked nonsense." Winners were determined by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is."

It was a sensational claim. Was it true?

John Sutherland, who judged the 1999 prize, offered a more nuanced view. "There is a well-established London literary community," he explained. "Rushdie doesn't get shortlisted now because he has attacked that community. That is not a good game plan if you want to win the Booker."

Sutherland pointed to Martin Amis as the clearest example of political dynamics affecting the prize. Amis, one of the most celebrated British novelists of his generation, had only been shortlisted once—for Time's Arrow, widely considered not one of his strongest books. "That really is suspicious," Sutherland said. "He pissed people off with Dead Babies and that gets lodged in the culture."

Whether you call it politics, cliques, or simply the normal dynamics of any community where everyone knows everyone else, the Booker has never been a purely objective assessment of literary merit. How could it be? Literature isn't mathematics. There's no formula for determining which novel is "best."

Breaking the Rules in 2019

In 1992, the jury had split the prize between Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. The foundation responded by establishing a firm rule: from then on, the prize must go to a single author.

For twenty-seven years, every jury followed that rule.

Then came 2019.

The jury, chaired by Peter Florence, faced an impossible choice between two novels they considered equally brilliant: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale) and Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other.

They were told, explicitly and firmly, that the rules prohibited splitting the prize.

They split it anyway.

"We came down to a discussion with the director of the Booker Prize about the rules," Florence explained afterward. "And we were told quite firmly that the rules state that you can only have one winner... As we have managed the jury all the way through on the principle of consensus, our consensus was that it was our decision to flout the rules and divide this year's prize to celebrate two winners."

The decision made history in multiple ways. Evaristo became the first Black woman ever to win the Booker. Atwood, at seventy-nine, became the oldest winner. Both novels became enormous bestsellers.

The foundation was reportedly furious. But what could they do? The announcement had been made. The prize had been awarded. Sometimes consensus beats bureaucracy.

The Money Behind the Prize

Understanding the Booker requires understanding its sponsorship history—because the name on the prize has changed several times, reflecting the complicated relationship between art and commerce.

Booker McConnell sponsored the prize from 1969 until 2002, when administration transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation. At that point, the investment company Man Group became the title sponsor, and the award was renamed the "Man Booker Prize." The prize money doubled from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand pounds.

Man Group continued sponsoring for eighteen years—a remarkably long run for corporate arts patronage. When they stepped back in 2019, a new sponsor emerged: Crankstart, a charitable foundation run by Sir Michael Moritz (a venture capitalist famous for early investments in Google and Yahoo) and his wife, Harriet Heyman.

The award title was simplified to just "The Booker Prize."

Today, the Booker Prize Foundation is an independent registered charity. It's funded entirely by the profits of Booker Prize Trading Ltd, of which it is the sole shareholder. The foundation is led by Gaby Wood, who has been chief executive since 2015.

Each shortlisted author receives twenty-five hundred pounds and a specially bound edition of their book—a consolation prize of sorts, though being shortlisted for the Booker is itself a career-making honor. Booksellers report significant sales bumps just from the shortlist announcement.

The Sister Prizes

The original Booker only honors novels written in English. But what about brilliant literature written in other languages and translated into English?

That's where the International Booker Prize comes in. Awarded annually, it celebrates the best work of fiction translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The fifty-thousand-pound prize is split evenly between the author and translator—a welcome acknowledgment that translation is itself a creative act requiring enormous skill.

Unlike the main Booker, short story collections are eligible for the International Booker. In 2025, Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp: Selected Stories became the first short story collection to win. This was notable because short story collections had only ever been shortlisted once for the main prize—Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid in 1980.

A third award, the Children's Booker Prize, was launched in 2025, with the inaugural winner to be announced in 2027. This expansion suggests the Booker brand is strong enough to extend into new territory—children's literature being an enormous market with its own prestige awards like the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery.

The Lost Man Booker Prize

Here's an odd wrinkle in Booker history.

In 1971, the prize's eligibility rules changed. Previously, the award had been given retrospectively, honoring books published the year before. Starting in 1971, the prize covered books published in the same year as the award ceremony.

This meant books published in 1970 fell into a gap. They weren't eligible for the 1970 prize (which covered 1969 books) or the 1971 prize (which covered 1971 books). An entire year of literature was simply... skipped.

Forty years later, the foundation corrected this oversight. In January 2010, they announced the "Lost Man Booker Prize," with a longlist of twenty-two novels from 1970. The public could vote for their favorite.

The winner was J. G. Farrell for Troubles, a novel about the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy set during the Irish War of Independence. It was a poignant choice—Farrell had died in 1979, drowning while fishing off the coast of Ireland. He never knew his novel would eventually receive the recognition it deserved.

Recent Years

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the Booker to adapt. In 2020, the traditional black-tie ceremony was replaced with a livestream from the Roundhouse in London. The shortlisted authors couldn't even attend.

That year's winner was Douglas Stuart for Shuggie Bain, a devastating novel about a boy growing up in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic mother. The book had been rejected by more than thirty publishers before finally finding a home. Its Booker win felt like vindication—proof that the prize could still discover overlooked masterpieces.

In 2021, Damon Galgut won for The Promise. The South African writer had been shortlisted twice before, in 2003 and 2010, making his win feel like a long-overdue coronation.

The 2022 ceremony was "re-imagined," hosted by comedian Sophie Duker with a keynote speech by the pop star Dua Lipa—a clear attempt to make the prize feel more contemporary and less stuffy. Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka won for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

In 2023, the shortlist featured three writers named Paul (Lynch, Murray, and Harding). Paul Lynch won for Prophet Song, a novel about a family trapped in an Ireland descending into authoritarianism. Reviews were mixed—The Guardian praised it for jolting "the reader awake to truths we mostly cannot bear to admit," while The Daily Telegraph dismissed it as "political fiction at its laziest."

The 2024 prize went to Samantha Harvey for Orbital, notable for being the first book set in space to win and, at 136 pages, the second shortest winner ever (after Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore). Harvey was also the first woman to win since 2019—the shared year of Evaristo and Atwood.

Most recently, in 2025, the Hungarian-British writer David Szalay won for Flesh.

Multiple Winners

Only four writers have won the Booker Prize twice.

Peter Carey, the Australian novelist, was the first to achieve this in 2001. J. M. Coetzee, the South African-born writer who later became an Australian citizen, followed. Hilary Mantel won twice for her Thomas Cromwell novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies—a remarkable achievement given that they were consecutive books in the same historical trilogy.

Margaret Atwood completes the quartet, though her second win came with the asterisk of being shared with Bernardine Evaristo.

Interestingly, Salman Rushdie—despite being perhaps the most famous Booker winner of all, thanks to Midnight's Children in 1981—has never won a second time. According to former judge John Sutherland, this may be because Rushdie "attacked" the London literary community and paid the price in future shortlistings.

Why the Booker Matters

The Booker Prize matters because literature needs champions.

In an age of infinite entertainment options—streaming services, social media, video games, podcasts—the novel faces stiff competition for attention. Literary fiction, in particular, often struggles to find readers. These aren't beach reads or thrillers designed for mass appeal. They're challenging, ambitious works that require effort and concentration.

The Booker provides an annual spotlight. It generates news coverage, bookstore displays, reading group discussions. It gives reviewers an excuse to write at length about novels that might otherwise get minimal attention. It creates cultural moments.

The prize also shapes careers. Winning the Booker doesn't just sell copies of the winning book—it transforms how an author is perceived. Publishers offer larger advances. Rights sell in more countries. Suddenly, an author who was respected but obscure becomes a household name.

For all its controversies—the accusations of insider politics, the dramatic judge walkouts, the rule-breaking—the Booker endures because it does something valuable. It makes people pay attention to books.

And in a culture that often seems to have forgotten how to pay attention, that's no small thing.