Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Booker-McConnell Prize and commonly known simply as the Booker Prize) is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom.

Quotes

 * You might easily be convinced that the highest literary award given in Britain and the Commonwealth, the Booker Prize, contains a long list of classic titles. I'm sure none of you would question that many of the titles that have won the Newbery Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and the new Michael L. Printz Award are classics of children's and teen literature. I wonder, though, how likely many of you would be to accept that the books that have won the Golden Spur Award for great Western writing, or the Edgar Award for mystery writing, or the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction and fantasy, are truly classics?


 * The legacy of imperialism is deeply implicated in contemporary society, and the Booker Prize reflects this pervasiveness. Ambiguities and resistances open up in the reversals that take place between the discourses of the colonizer and the colonized, and these are explored in differing ways in the Booker novels. From the resistance of the Collectorate to Sepoy attacks in J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) to the encroachment of modernism on traditional African village life in Okri's The Famished Road; in the lingering effects of colonialism in Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (1987); in the evaporation of the British "gentleman abroad" in P. H. Newby's Something to Answer For (1969), and in the fragmented identities of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) - all of these novels participate in post-imperial culture or the culture of 'post-empire.'