Booker Prize | Winner and Historical Background

The Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious accolades in the literary world, continues to honour exceptional works of fiction. However, recent conversations surrounding the prize have brought attention to the colonial-era legacy of its original sponsor, the Booker Group, which had historical ties to slavery in British Guyana.

Key Points

• Britain gained control of Guyana through the Treaty of Paris in 1815.
• Guyana is a country in South America bordered by Suriname to the east, Brazil to the south, and Venezuela to the west.
• Its economy was driven by the sugar and cotton industries, with African slaves providing labour in plantations.
• The Booker Brothers Josias & George were involved in the exploitative slave-based economy of British Guyana. In a cotton plantation, they enslaved nearly 200 people.
• After slavery was abolished in Guyana in 1834 and African slaves were emancipated, the Booker brothers received compensation for 52 emancipated slaves, totalling 2,884 Pounds (equivalent to 378,000 Pounds in 2020).
• Bookers convinced the British government to finance voyages to collect replacement sugar workers from India.
• This led to the exploitation of Indian workers who faced debt and unemployment due to the East India Company’s policies and were sent to Guyana by the East India Company.
• The indentured labour system lasted till about the 1920s, leading to a significant migration of labourers from India to Guyana.
• People of Indian origin are now the single largest ethnic group in Guyana due to the scale of migration.

About the Booker Prize

• The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.
• Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career.
• It was initially awarded to Commonwealth writers and now spans the globe, and it is open to anyone regardless of origin.
• The winner receives £50,000 as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.
• Both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a global readership and can expect a dramatic increase in book sales.

Origins 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, 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.

Booker Prize winners from India

Complete List Of Booker Prize Winners (1969-2022)

What Is The International Booker Prize?

• The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single book, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
• The International Booker Prize began life in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize.
• 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.
• The vital work of translators is celebrated, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and translator.

Tomb of Sand: International Booker Prize Winner

• “Tomb of Sand’, has become the first book written in an Indian language to be awarded the International Booker Prize.
• Originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi, the book is written by Author Geetanjali Shree and translated into English by Daisy Rockwell.
• The book narrates the story of an 80-year-old woman who experiences a deep depression after the death of her husband.
• Eventually, she overcomes her depression and decides to visit Pakistan to finally confront the past that she left behind during the Partition.

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