Literary Awards

The Booker Prize

The Booker Group plc is the UK's largest food wholesaler. Originally founded in 1835, it was known in 1968 (when the prize was founded) as Booker–McConnell Ltd. John 'Jock' Campbell, who was its Chairman from 1952 to 1967, had founded an Author Division within the company, after purchasing 51 per cent of Glidrose Ltd, which owned the copyrights of his friend Ian Fleming. The Division later bought up the rights to the works of other well–known authors, including Denis Wheatley, and a 64% stake in those of Agatha Christie. Administration of the prize was transferred to an independent foundation in 2002, and from then until 2019 it was sponsored by the MAN Group plc, a London–based investment management company, and officially known as the MAN Booker Prize for Fiction. Since 2019 the prize has been sponsored by Crankstart, a charitable foundation run by the Welsh–born American venture capitalist and philanthropist Sir Michael Moritz, and known once again as the Booker Prize. Crankstart undertook to sponsor the prize for five years, with an option for a further five years.

Eligibility was originally limited to "citizens of" the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, and

First awarded (as the Booker–McConnell Prize)		1969
First winner	Title	Something to Answer For
First winner	Author	P. H. Newby
Name changed to the Man Booker Prize for Fiction		2002
Eligibility changed to any novel written in English		2013

Youngest winner (2013 – aged 28)		Eleanor Catton
Best–selling winner (2002)		Life of Pi

'Booker of Bookers' (2008)

The 'Best of the Booker' prize – commonly known as the Booker of Bookers – was awarded in 2008 to celebrate the prize's 40th anniversary. The winner was chosen by public vote from a shortlist of six. The other five shortlisted titles were the winners from 1973, 1974 (The Conservationist), 1988, 1995 and 1999.

Title		Midnight's Children
Author		Salman Rushdie
Year of publication		1981

'The Lost Man Booker Prize' (2010)

In the first two years of the Booker Prize – 1969 and 1970 – it was books published in the previous year that were eligible; from 1971 it was books published in the year of the award. This meant that books published in 1970 had never been eligible for a Booker prize. The Lost Booker Prize was awarded in 2010 to correct this anomaly. As with the Booker of Bookers, the winner was chosen by public vote from a shortlist of six.

Title		Troubles
Author		J. G. Farrell

Poignantly, the recipient of the Lost Booker Prize had died 31 years previously (see note below).

'Golden Man Booker' (2018)

The 'Golden Man Booker' prize was awarded in 2018 to celebrate the prize's 50th anniversary. The winner was chosen by public vote from a shortlist of five – one from each decade – which did not include any of the six books that had been shortlisted for the Booker of Bookers prize ten years earlier (see above). The other four shortlisted titles were the winners from 1971, 1987, 2009 and 2017.

Title		The English Patient
Author		Michael Ondaatje
Year of publication		1992

Multiple winners

First person to win twice (South African – 1983 and 1999)		J. M. Coetzee
Second person to win twice (Australian – 1988 and 2001)		Peter Carey
First woman, and the first British author, to win twice (2009, 2012)		Hilary Mantel
Won in 1973, and won the so–called 'Lost Booker' prize in 2010		J. G. Farrell

All winners

Year	Title		Author	Nationality
2022	The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida	M	Shehan Karunatilaka	Sri Lanka
2021	The Promise	M	Damon Galgut	South Africa
2020	Shuggie Bain	M	Douglas Stuart	Scotland
2019	The Testaments	F	Margaret Atwood	Canada
2019	Girl, Woman, Other	F	Bernardine Evaristo	England
2018	Milkman	F	Anna Burns	Northern Ireland
2017	Lincoln in the Bardo	M	George Sanders	USA
2016	The Sellout	M	Paul Beatty	USA
2015	A Brief History of Seven Killings	M	Marlon James	Jamaica
2014	The Narrow Road to the Deep North	M	Richard Flanagan	Australia
2013	The Luminaries	F	Eleanor Catton	New Zealand
2012	Bring Up the Bodies	F	Hilary Mantel	England
2011	The Sense of an Ending	M	Julian Barnes	England
2010	The Finkler Question	M	Howard Jacobson	England
2009	Wolf Hall	F	Hilary Mantel	England
2008	The White Tiger	M	Aravind Adiga	India
2007	The Gathering	F	Anne Enright	Ireland
2006	The Inheritance of Loss	F	Kiran Desai	India
2005	The Sea	M	John Banville	Ireland
2004	The Line of Beauty	M	Alan Hollinghurst	England
2003	Vernon God Little	M	DBC Pierre	Australia
2002	Life of Pi	M	Yann Martel	Canada
2001	True History of the Kelly Gang	M	Peter Carey	Australia
2000	The Blind Assassin	F	Margaret Atwood	Canada
1999	Disgrace	M	J. M. Coetzee	South Africa
1998	Amsterdam	M	Ian McEwan	England
1997	The God of Small Things	F	Arundhati Roy	India
1996	Last Orders	M	Graham Swift	England
1995	The Ghost Road	F	Pat Barker	England
1994	How Late it was, How Late	M	James Kelman	Scotland
1993	Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha	M	Roddy Doyle	Ireland
1992	Sacred Hunger	M	Barry Unsworth	England
1992	The English Patient	M	Michael Ondaatje	Canada
1991	The Famished Road	M	Ben Okri	Nigeria
1990	Possession	F	A. S. Byatt	England
1989	The Remains of the Day	M	Kazuo Ishiguro	England
1988	Oscar and Lucinda	M	Peter Carey	Australia
1987	Moon Tiger	F	Penelope Lively	England
1986	The Old Devils	M	Kingsley Amis	England
1985	The Bone People	F	Keri Hulme	New Zealand
1984	Hotel du Lac	F	Anita Brookner	England
1983	Life & Times of Michael K	M	J. M. Coetzee	South Africa
1982	Schindler's Ark	M	Thomas Keneally	Australia
1981	Midnight's Children	M	Salman Rushdie	India
1980	Rites of Passage	M	William Golding	England
1979	Offshore	F	Penelope Fitzgerald	England
1978	The Sea, the Sea	F	Iris Murdoch	Anglo–Irish
1977	Staying On	M	Paul Scott	England
1976	Saville	M	David Storey	England
1975	Heat and Dust	F	Ruth Prawer Jhabvala	Germany
1974	The Conservationist	F	Nadine Gordimer	South Africa
1974	Holiday	M	Stanley Middleton	England
1973	The Siege of Krishnapur	M	J. G. Farrell	Anglo–Irish
1972	G	M	John Berger	England
1971	In a Free State	M	V. S. Naipaul	Trinidad
1970	The Elected Member	F	Bernice Rubens	Wales
1969	Something to Answer For	M	P. H. Newby	England

Bad Sex Award

The Literary Review is a British magazine, founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at Edinburgh University. It was edited from 1986 until his death in 2001 by the journalist Auberon Waugh – son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and a veteran of The Daily Telegraph and Private Eye.

What The Literary Review is most famous for (in quizzing circles, certainly, but also on Wikipedia) is its annual Bad Sex Award – introduced by Waugh in 1993, to highlight "poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction".

Selected winners:

First winner (1993), for A Time to Dance (British media giant, made a life peer in 1998)		Melvyn Bragg
1998: Charlotte Gray (best–selling British novelist, and a team captain on BBC Radio 4's literary quiz The Write Stuff)		Sebastian Faulks
1999: Starcrossed (controversial British journalist and critic)		A. A. Gill
2004: I Am Charlotte Simmons (author most famous for The Bonfire of the Vanities)		Tom Wolfe
2005: Winkler (member of a famous English media dynasty)		Giles Coren
2007: The Castle in the Forest (double Pulitzer winner, for The Executioner's Song and The Armies of the Night; also wrote The Naked and the Dead; unfortunately died 16 days before being announced as the winner – the judges were quoted as saying "We were sure he would have taken the prize in good humour")		Norman Mailer
2008: Lifetime Achievement Award (author of the acclaimed Rabbit series)		John Updike
2014: The Age of Magic (1991 Booker winner with The Famished Road)		Ben Okri
2015: List of the Lost ("1980s pop singer")		Morrissey

Pulitzer Prizes

Ivy League university that administers the Pulitzer Prize (after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer left money to it in his will for the purpose)

1918: the source for Orson Welles's second film (after Citizen Kane)	Booth Tarkington	The Magnificent Ambersons
1937: her only novel (and her only book, apart from juvenilia and newspaper articles published posthumously)	Margaret Mitchell	Gone with the Wind
1939 novel: John Ford won the Best Director Oscar for the 1940 film version, which starred Henry Fonda	John Steinbeck	The Grapes of Wrath
1951: filmed in 1954, starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg	Herman Wouk	The Caine Mutiny
1957: short biographies of eight US senators who defied the opinions of their party and voters to do what they felt was right	John F. Kennedy	Profiles in Courage
1983 novel: the 1985 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, was nominated for 11 Oscars but failed to win any	Alice Walker	The Color Purple
1984 play: adapted by the playwright in 1994 for a film, which starred Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin as four real estate agents (1992)	David Mamet	Glengarry Glen Ross
1985 novel: a fictionalised account of a real–life (1868) cattle drive by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving: made into a hugely successful and highly acclaimed 1989 TV miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as former Texas Rangers Augustus 'Gus' McCrae and Woodrow F. Call	Larry McMurtry	Lonesome Dove
1996 memoir, which spawned two sequels: Alan Parker's 1999 film version starred Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle	Frank McCourt	Angela's Ashes
1998: a novel by one of America's most respected authors; Ewan McGregor made his directorial debut with the film version, released in 2016	Philip Roth	American Pastoral

British Book Awards

The US National Book Awards were established in 1936, abandoned during World War II, and re–established in 1950. The UK versions were inaugurated in 1990. They are awarded by the UK publishing industry, and have appeared in various guises over the years. In 2016 they were rebranded as the British Book Industry Awards; the following year they were taken over by the Bookseller Magazine, and the word 'Industry' was dropped.

Sponsors of the British Book Awards like to refer to them as "the Nibbies".

A cynic might suggest that these awards are simply a bunfight for the publishing industry, celebrating the authors that have made them the most money over the year. But they also provide an excellent snapshot of Britain's favourite reading matter over the years – and that makes them a useful benchmark for the quizzer.

So here are the winners of the Book of the Year award, in all its various guises:

2023: a "groundbreaking book which discusses every aspect [of its subject] with candour, rigour and common sense"	Davina McCall	Menopausing
2022: a motivational self–help book for children, by "the nation's favourite footballer"	Marcus Rashford	You Are a Champion
2021: the previous year's Booker winner – "an uncompromising yet tender and warmly witty exploration of love, pride and poverty"	Douglas Stuart	Shuggie Bain
2020: "a darkly comic and unflinchingly raw depiction of a young (black) woman trying to navigate her way in the world" (Amazon)	Candice Carty–Williams	Queenie
2019: "a spellbinding twenty–first–century love story" (TLS)	Sally Rooney	Normal People
2018: "a funny and sad tale of a survivor who tackles the challenges of emotional reconnection with grave courage" (Sunday Express)	Gail Honeyman	Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
2017: "What seems to be a story about superstition and a strange prehistoric monster becomes an exposition of the Victorian world in microcosm"	Sarah Perry	The Essex Serpent
2016: an "eerie, suspenseful debut novel about two brothers hailed as a masterful excursion into terror"	Andrew Michael Hurley	The Loney (sic)
2014: the debut novel of a former actress, inspired by a real–life exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam	Jessie Burton	The Miniaturist
2013: a novel by the author of the comic book series The Sandman, whose early works included Good Omens, a collaboration with Terry Pratchett set at the time of the end of the world	Neil Gaiman	The Ocean at the End of the Lane
2012: a novel – the first in a trilogy that traces the deepening relationship between a female college graduate and a young male business magnate; the UK's fastest–selling paperback ever	E. L. James	50 Shades of Grey
2011: a feminist memoir by a former music journalist and broadcaster	Caitlin Moran	How to Be a Woman
2010: a novel that covers the lives of its two protagonists on St. Swithin's Day (15 July), each year for twenty years (each chapter covering one year)	David Nicholls	One Day
2009: the story of the investigation into a real–life murder that helped to inspire the first English detective novel	Kate Summerscale	The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
2008: a short novel, by the author who won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, set on and around the famous Dorset coastal feature that appears in the title	Ian McEwan	On Chesil Beach
2007: a retro–style "guidebook" aimed at boys "from eight to eighty", describing how to build a treehouse, grow a crystal, or tell direction with a watch (among lots of other things)	Conn and Hal Iggulden	The Dangerous Book for Boys
2006: the sixth and penultimate volume in a series of children's novels that also represents the summit of many an adult's literary ambitions, and was made into the second–highest–grossing film series ever	J. K. Rowling	Harry Potter and the Half–Blood Prince
2005: controversial mystery–detective novel, highly critical of the Catholic Church – the 2006 film adaptation grossed three quarters of a billion dollars	Dan Brown	The Da Vinci Code
2004: subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation; a lament for the neglect of punctuation in the English language, by a former Times journalist and BBC Radio 4 panel game host	Lynne Truss	Eats, Shoots and Leaves
2003: subtitled … and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!; a highly critical appraisal of the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations, and US government in general	Michael Moore	Stupid White Men
2002: a biography of her famous husband, by a New Zealand–born actress and clinical psychologist	Pamela Stephenson	Billy
2001: the book that established the reputation of this former music journalist as a novelist	Tony Parsons	Man and Boy
2000: the first in a seemingly endless series of autobiographies by "one of the greatest and most successful managers of all time"	Alex Ferguson	Managing My Life
1999: a collection of poems by Britain's Poet Laureate, published just months before his death in 1998; widely considered to be his most explicit response to the suicide in 1963 of his estranged (and equally famous) wife, and to their widely discussed, politicised and "explosive" marriage	Ted Hughes	Birthday Letters
1998: a 1996 novel that began in 1995 as an anonymous column in The Independent newspaper	Helen Fielding	Bridget Jones's Diary
1997: the story of John Harrison, an 18th–century clockmaker who revolutionised the science of navigation, simply by creating a highly–accurate clock (chronometer); quite possibly the book that inspired the ending to Only Fools and Horses	Dava Sobell	Longitude
1996: the follow–up to How to Cook (Books One, Two and Three)	Delia Smith	Delia's Winter Collection
1995: a memoir and a collection of essays by a multi–talented British author – probably best known for the series of television monologues Talking Heads and the play The Madness of George III	Alan Bennett	Writing Home
1994: subtitled Three Women of China; a family history spanning a century, recounting the lives of the author's grandmother and her mother, then finally her own autobiography	Jung Chang	Wild Swans

Other Awards

Despite what you might expect, not all pub quizzers are great readers. Or if they are, they tend to have their specialist subjects. What they don't tend to read is the type of books that win awards – in which so–called 'literary fiction' is one genre that figures strongly. This is why book awards don't feature all that often in the pub quiz – or so, at least, it seems to me.

Apart from the Booker, and the very occasional mention of the other awards we've already looked at, the most you're likely to get asked is to identify an award from a brief description, or the type of book that a particular award is concerned with. So here's a selection.

One of Britain's earliest annual literary awards: established in 1919 by the philanthropist Alice Warrender (1857–1947); awarded to authors aged 40 or under, on the quality of their "imaginative literature" (either poetry or prose)		Hawthornden Prize
Founded in 1919 in memory of a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd, by his widow; awarded in three categories – Fiction, Biography and Drama		James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1996: awarded annually to a female author, of any nationality, for the best original full–length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year	1996–2012	Orange Prize for Fiction
	Since 2014	Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
Three annual awards for political writing (two prior to 2015), founded in 1993 by the political theorist Bernard Crick and administered by University College London; named after a prominent British political writer of the 20th century		Orwell Prize
Founded in 1999 based on an anonymous donation, and administered by the BBC: awarded for the best non–fiction writing in the English language and published in the UK; renamed in 2016 after its new sponsor, an Edinburgh–based investment management company	1999–2015	Samuel Johnson Prize
	Since 2016	Baillie Gifford Prize
Awarded by the Society of Authors to the best writer or writers under the age of 35, to be spent on foreign travel; named after the English author who instituted it in 1947		Somerset Maugham Award
Prize for historical fiction, founded in 2010 by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleugh and named after a writer who was closely linked to their family		Walter Scott Prize
Founded in 1971: awarded for English–language books by writers based in Britain and Ireland, in five categories – Novel, First novel, Children's book, Poetry, Biology; given for readability as well as literary merit; the overall winner is chosen from the winners of the five categories	1971–2005	Whitbread Book Awards
	Since 2006	Costa Book Awards
(UK) Sports Book of the Year award: founded in 1989, sponsored throughout its life to date by (bookmaker)		William Hill

The Hugo awards (named after Hugo Gernsback, founder of the pioneering magazine Amazing Stories) are for

Came top in Waterstone's 1997 poll (in association with Channel 4) to find the public's choice as Book of the Century, and also in the BBC's Big Read (2003)

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