The Booker Prize at 50
In July 2018 The Booker Prize celebrated its half century, with a special festival of events at the Southbank Centre featuring 17 former winners of the award.
To commemorate this special occasion we produced a special book podcast celebrating The Booker Prize’s 50th year. Ted Hodgkinson, our Head of Literature and Spoken Word, brought together extracts from Southbank Centre talks with four previous winners of the prize; Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Marlon James and George Saunders.
In this podcast Hodgkinson also speaks in depth with the Booker Prize Foundation Literary Director Gaby Wood to find out what goes on behind the scenes of the prize, what makes a Booker Prize winner, and why the foundation chose to open the contest up to American authors.
‘Man survives by his ability to forget, but those around them are sometimes filled with the strange incommunable wounds they bring home with them, and it falls to others to somehow seek to communicate them’.
Richard Flanagan, 2014 Booker Prize winner speaking at the Southbank Centre