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What is a Booker Prize?
The Booker Prize is a literary prize awarded every year to the best novel written in the English language which is published in the UK or Ireland. It is a high-profile literary prize and thus, is much anticipated among book lovers.
It is a mark of distinction for authors to be selected in the shortlist or even to be nominated for the "longlist".
Background of Booker Prize
In 1969, the Booker Prize for Fiction was formed after the company Booker McConnell Ltd began sponsoring the award. Later, in 2002, the administration was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation, sponsored by the Man Group, which retained "Booker" in the award title.
The prize money awarded to the author was originally 21,000 pounds and was raised to 50,000 pounds in 2002.
In 1971, the rules of the Booker changed in which, the eligibility to be shortlisted was changed to the same year of the award, meaning books published in 1970 were not considered in either 1970 or 71. In 2010, the foundation created a special award called "Lost Man Booker Prize" to choose a winner from a long list of 22 novels from 1970.
Booker Prize selection process
The process to select the winner begins once an advisory committee, which includes a writer, two publishers, a literary agent, a bookseller, a librarian, and a chairperson gets appointed by the foundation. The committee then selects a judging panel, which changes every year. The judges are selected from leading critics, writers, and academics.
The Booker Prize winner then is announced in an event in London's Guildhall in October.
In 2020, Scottish-American Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Shuggie Bain. In 2019, the prize was shared among two women authors, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, for their books The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other.
BOOKER PRIZE winners: Indians
VS Naipaul, In a Free State (1971)
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)