The Man Booker international Prize 2005
The new £60,000 international literature award was launched by the organisers of the Booker Prize for Fiction and will be awarded every two years. The existing Booker Prize is open to citizens of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The new global prize can be won by a living author of any nationality who has published fiction either originally in English or widely available in translation in the English language. The prize recognises the author's achievements in fiction and is awarded based on the author's work as a whole, rather than a single book. An author may win the award only once.
A shortlist of 18 contenders was announced in February and included authors from 13 different countries, five Nobel Laureates and two winners of the regular Man Booker Prize.
The nominees were:
- Margaret Atwood (Canada),
- Saul Bellow (Canada),
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia),
- Gunter Grass(Germany),
- Ismail Kadare (Albania),
- Milan Kundera (Czech Republic),
- Stanislaw Lem (Poland),
- Doris Lessing (UK),
- Ian McEwan (UK),
- Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt),
- Toman Eloy Martinez (Argentina),
- Kenzaburo Oe (Japan),
- Cynthia Ozick (US),
- Philip Roth (US),
- Muriel Spark (UK),
- Antonio Tabbuchi (Italy),
- John Updike (US) and
- Abraham B Yehoshua (Israel)
On 2 June this year, Ismail Kadare was named as winner of the first ever Man Booker International Prize. Born in 1936 in the Albanian town of Gjirokaster near the Greek Border, Kadare is Albania's best-known poet and novelist, and translations of his novels have been published in more than forty countries.
Kadare received the prize of £60,000 and a trophy at the official award ceremony at the Royal Museum on 27 June 2005, where a keynote lecture was given by the chair of judges, Professor John Carey.
To complement the exclusive awards dinner for 250 people, Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature has developed a programme of hosting activities around the Man Booker International Prize Ceremony. Plans included:
- specially devised literary tours of Edinburgh and a presentation copy of a literary history of the city for guests,
- a Q&A session with the winner for librarians and students and
- tie-ins with the winner's work across the city's bookshops, universities, schools and libraries.
The Man Group and the Trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation also announced that an additional prize of £15,000 would be awarded if the winning author was published in English translation. The prize would only be awarded where the winning author's fiction had been translated into English from the original language. The winning author would choose who the translator's prize should go to and whether it should be awarded to one translator or several. Translators play a huge role in making fiction accessible to a global audience and this award has been announced to recognise their part in the readers' enjoyment of the work.
Kadare nominated David Bellos for the Translator's Prize, and on 22 June Bellos was announced as the sole winner of the £15,000 prize. Bellos, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, has translated five of Kadare's novels, including The File on H, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost and The Pyramid.
Please visit the Man Booker International Prize website for more information about the prize. |