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Booker Prize 2022

  • Posted By
    10Pointer
  • Categories
    World Affairs
  • Published
    19th Oct, 2022

Context

Sri Lankan author, Shehan Karunatilaka has won Britain’s Booker Prize 2022 for fiction for his work “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, about a journalist murdered amid the country’s sectarian strife.

What is the Booker Prize?

  • The Booker Prize is one of the best-known literary awards for fiction writing in English, including both novels and collections of short stories.
  • It was first awarded in 1969.
  • Every year a panel of judges decides the best work of the year, with the criteria being that it must be written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.
  • This panel of judges is picked from among eminent cultural historians, writers, professors, and novelists, and others from related fields.
  • For the Booker Prize, the winner receives £50,000.

What about the International Booker Prize?

  • The International Booker Prize began in 2005.
  • A biennial prize initially, it was then awarded for a body of work available in English.
  • In 2015, the rules of the International prize changed to make it an annual affair.
  • The new rules stipulated that it will be awarded annually for a single book, written in another language and translated into English.
  • The £50,000 prize money is divided equally between the author and translator each year.

Why is it called the ‘Booker’?

  • The Booker Prize, from 1969 to 2001, was named simply after the Booker Group Limited – a British food wholesale operator that was its initial sponsor.
  • The Man Group, an investment management firm based in the UK, began to sponsor the prize in 2002 and it thus came to be known as The Man Booker Prize.
  • The Man Group ended their sponsorship in 2019.
  • Crankstart, an American charitable foundation, has been the sponsor after that. 
    • The prize name has changed back to the ‘Booker’ since then.

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