The Booker brothers and enslavement
When the Booker Prize was first conceived, in 1968, its founders Tom Maschler and Graham C Greene found a backer in Booker McConnell, a wholesale food distributor with a long-term presence in Guyana
The origins of our prizes
Each year the Booker Prize Foundation awards the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize, two of the world’s most prestigious literary honours
The history of the Booker Prize
The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969. Its aim was to stimulate the reading and discussion of contemporary fiction.
The publishers Tom Maschler and Graham C Greene, who came up with the idea for the prize, found a backer in Booker McConnell, a conglomerate with a significant long-term presence in Guyana. The company had recently acquired a commercial interest in literary estates.
Ian Fleming, a good friend and golfing partner of Booker Chairman Jock Campbell, had died in 1964. Before he did, Campbell established an ‘authors’ division’ within Booker, and bought (for £100,000) a 51 per cent share in the profits from worldwide royalties on Fleming’s books. The Booker Authors’ Division would go on to acquire the copyrights of Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer and Harold Pinter, among others.
Thus a prize for writers and readers of the Commonwealth – not just Britain – was born. In 1969, the inaugural Booker Prize was awarded to P.H. Newby for his novel Something to Answer For. Thirty years later, Booker Chairman Michael Caine would write that ‘The Booker Prize can trace its origin, through quirks of history and the imaginativeness of one individual, to James Bond and the attainment of political freedom in Guyana’. (Guyana had gained independence in 1966.)
The life of the Booker Prize over the past half-century has exceeded the imaginings of its founders several times over. The BBC first televised the prize ceremony in 1976, and the level of conversation, competition and controversy increased exponentially in the years that followed. In the 21st century, winning the Booker Prize can change a writer’s life, and grant him or her a readership for many decades to come.
P.H. Newby at his desk
© P.H. Newby Literary EstateThe history of the International Booker Prize
The symmetrical relationship between the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize ensures that the Booker honours fiction on a global basis: world-class fiction is highlighted by the prizes for English-speaking readers, whether that work was originally written in English (the Booker Prize) or translated into English (the International Booker Prize).
The International Booker Prize began life in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize. It was initially a biennial prize for a body of work, and there was no stipulation that the work should be written in a language other than English. Early winners of the Man Booker International Prize therefore include Alice Munro, Lydia Davis and Philip Roth, as well as Ismail Kadare and László Krasznahorkai.
In 2015, after the rules of the original Booker Prize expanded to allow writers of any nationality to enter – as long as their books were written in English and published in the UK – the International Prize evolved to become the mirror image of the English-language prize. Since then it has been awarded annually for a single book, written in another language and translated into English.
The Man Group continued to sponsor both prizes until 2019, when Crankstart became the funder, and the prize names reverted to the familiar ‘Booker’ name alone.
This prize aims to encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world, and has already had an impact on those statistics in the UK. Novels and collections of short stories are both eligible.
Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare.
© Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Getty Images
