Close

Booker Prize Archive

The Booker Prize for Fiction is an annual prize open to any novel originally written in English and published in the UK.

Booker Prize for Fiction

The Booker Prize for Fiction is an annual prize open to any novel originally written in English and published in the UK, regardless of the nationality of the author. 

The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969, when authors had to be from the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. It became the Man Booker Prize in 2002. The Man Group generously sponsored the prize for 18 successful years. 

In June 2019, the prize had a new sponsor, Crankstart, the charitable foundation of Sir Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman. Both are keen readers of fiction and are fully committed to the work of the Booker Prize Foundation and to the prizes. The prize went back to being called The Booker Prize at the same time. 

Past winners include:

  • V S Naipaul
  • Iris Murdoch
  • William Golding
  • Salman Rushdie
  • Peter Carey
  • Arundhati Roy
  • Ian McEwan
  • John Banville 
  • Hilary Mantel. 

Further information about the prize can be found on the website for The Booker Prizes.

Contact us

Saffron Shore

Saffron Shore

Academic Liaison Librarian

Archive

The Archive encompasses the administrative history of the prizes from 1968 to date, including the Booker International and Booker Russian Novel prizes, as well as one-off prizes such as the Golden Man Booker - awarded in 2018 to celebrate 50 years of the main prize. The collection comprises a diverse range of material including:

  • correspondence
  • publicity material
  • copies of both the Longlists and the Shortlists
  • minutes of meetings
  • photographs 
  • material relating to the awards dinner (letters of invitation, guest lists, seating plans). 

Embargoes of ten or twenty years apply to certain categories of material, examples include all material relating to the judging process and the publishers' submissions.

The Library became the permanent home of the Booker Prize Archive in 2003 and online Archive Catalogue records exist for material from 1968 - present. The Archive is available for consultation. 

The Man Booker Prize celebrated it's 50th anniversary in 2018. As part of the celebrations, we digitised 50 items from the Archive that help to tell the story of the prize.

Complementary collections

Complementary material held by the Library includes manuscripts donated by the family of inaugural Prize Winner P.H. Newby and the First Chapter Series (Booker Prize) donated by Oak Tree Fine Press.

The library also keeps a collection of Booker Prize Shortlisted Novels, shelved on level 4 zone D, in prize year order. Titles from 2001-present can be borrowed on standard loan. Pre-2001 titles are reference copies, but we likely also hold a standard loan copy shelved elsewhere, please check LibrarySearch. If we do not hold a loanable copy, we will order one in at your request. Please contact Saffron Shore sshore@brookes.ac.uk. 

Display case of archive material
Display cases at the exhibition at the Glass Tank celebrating Women and the Booker Prize
Display of books on a table
Books displays at the exhibition at the Glass Tank celebrating Women and the Booker Prize

Open Lecture series: Judging the Booker

As part of our Open Lecture series, Costa Poetry Prize winner of Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019) and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Dr Mary Jean Chan, explored their role as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize in conversation with Dr Enora Lessinger.

Chan and Lessinger reflect on some of the longlisted and shortlisted works, the Booker Prize more generally, and take questions from the audience.

View a recording of the event