Booker Prize, an award of £50,000 (originally £5,000) for the best novel of the year published in English in Great Britain; prior to 2014, it was only given to a British, Irish, or Commonwealth writer. Great Britain's premier literary award, it was established in 1968, first awarded in 1969, and underwritten by the British food-distribution company Booker McConnell Ltd, later Booker PLC and subsequently part of The Big Food Group PLC. In 2002 the Booker Prize Foundation was created to award the prize, and the Man Group, a British hedge fund, became sponsor (until 2019) of the award, which was renamed the Man Booker Prize. The Crankstart Foundation now sponsors the award under its original name. Recipients of the award have included V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and Julian Barnes.
The International Booker Prize was introduced in 2004 as the Man Booker International Prize. Originally given for overall achievement in fiction, it was presented every two years to a living author of any nationality whose fiction was either written in English or was generally available in English translation. It was first given (2005) to the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare and was subsequently awarded to Nigerian Chinua Achebe, Canadian Alice Munro, Americans Philip Roth and Lydia Davis, and Hungarian László Krasznahorkai. In 2015 the award was made an annual prize (from 2016) for the best novel published in English translation in Great Britain, with the prize money of £50,000 to be shared by the author and translator. Among the subsequent novelits who have won the prize are South Korea's Han Kang, Israel's David Grossman, and Poland's Olga Tokarczuk.
The Man Asian Literary Prize was founded by the Hong Kong International Literary Festival with the financial support of the Man Group. Awarded for the years 2007–12, it aimed to bring new Asian writers to the attention of the world literary community, to encourage the translation and publication in English of such writers' works, and to emphasize Asia's increasing role in world literature.
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