BOOKER PRIZE

formerly Booker McConnell Prize prestigious British award given annually to a full-length novel; those eligible include English-language writers from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth countries, the Republic of Ireland, and South Africa. Booker McConnell, a multinational company, established the award in 1968 to provide a counterpart to the Prix Goncourt in France. The prize was the subject of controversy on several occasions, and in 1984 Salman Rushdie, the winner of the prize in 1981, described the judging committee as Killjoyces and Anti-Prousts after the committee chairman stated that he had not read the fiction of James Joyce and Marcel Proust and did not want to award the prize to writers like them. The award is administered by the Book Trust, and well-known recipients of the prize include V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Iris Murdoch, J.M. Coetzee, A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, Penelope Lively, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, and Barry Unsworth. In 1992 the Booker Russian Novel Prize was set up to reward contemporary Russian authors, to stimulate wider knowledge of modern Russian fiction, and to encourage translation and publication of Russian fiction outside Russia. In response to the dearth of women on the shortlist for this and other prestigious literary awards, the annual Orange Prize for Fiction was established in 1996 in the United Kingdom.