The Man Booker International Prize 2011

Worth £60,000 to the winner, the prize is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.

The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers. Canadian author, Alice Munro won the 2009 prize,  Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe won the 2007 prize and Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare won the inaugural prize in 2005 and went on to gain worldwide recognition for his work. In addition, there is a separate prize for translation and, if applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000.

The Man Booker International Prize echos and reinforces the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that literary excellence will be its sole focus. The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer's overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.  In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer's body of work rather than a single novel.

The judges

• Dr Rick Gekoski (chair)
  

  Dr. Rick Gekoski is one of the world’s leading bookmen: a writer, rare-book dealer, broadcaster and academic. An American who came to England in 1966, and now a dual UK/US citizen, he took a B. Phil and D.Phil. in English at Oxford University. From 1971-1987 he was a member of the English Department of the University of Warwick, where he became a senior lecturer and chairman of the Faculty of Arts. In the mid-1980s he started his business dealing in rare books and manuscripts of twentieth century English and American literature. He has established two private presses, The Sixth Chamber Press and The Bridgewater Press, which issue finely printed editions of leading writers, novelists and poets.

  He has published a critical book on Joseph Conrad, and co-authored the Bibliography of William Golding. Staying Up (1998), a book on Premiership football, was hailed as “richly comic” by Ian Hamilton, “…the year’s best soccer book by far.” In 2004, the acclaimed Tolkien’s Gown And Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books, was described by Colm Tóibín as “wonderfully paced and full of rich and fascinating detail,” and by David Lodge (Books of the Year) as “an irresistible mix of droll humour, shrewd literary criticism and fascinating anecdote.” In 2009, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir, an account of his life traced through his reading, received outstanding reviews.

  As a broadcaster he has written and delivered three series of Rare Books, Rare People for BBC Radio 4, which he followed with two series of Lost, Stolen, or Shredded: The History of Some Missing Works of Art.

  Rick teaches creative non-fiction for the Arvon Foundation, and sits on their Development Board. He was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2005.

• Carmen Callil
  

  Carmen Thérèse Callil is a publisher, writer and critic. She was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1938 and graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA Arts degree in History and Literature in 1960. Ever since, she has lived in London where she began work in publishing as a Publicity Manager. She left publishing in 1971 to work for Ink, a countercultural newspaper set up by Richard Neville, Andrew Fisher, Felix Dennis and Ed Victor.

  In 1972 Callil founded the publishing company, Virago, to publish books which celebrated women and women’s lives, literature and history. In 1982 she was appointed managing director of Chatto & Windus and The Hogarth Press where she remained until 1994, continuing, also, as chairman of Virago Press until 1995. In 1994 she was editor-at-large for Random House worldwide.

  From 1985-1991 she was on the board of Channel 4 Television. She served as a member of the management committee of the Booker Prize, 1979-1984; she was a founder director of The Groucho Club, London, 1984-1994; and in 1989 received the Distinguished Service Award from the International Women’s Writing Guild. She is a Doctor of Letters from Sheffield University, the University of York, Oxford Brookes University and the Open University. She has also been a judge of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and The Orwell Prize. She chaired the judges of the Booker Prize for Fiction, in 1996.

  Her publications include, The Modern Library: The Best 200 Novels in English since 1950 (Picador, 1999) a book about fiction, written with Colm Tóibín; The British Council’s New Writing 7 an anthology edited with Craig Raine (Vintage, 1998); and Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland, a book about Vichy France and World War II, and the man who oversaw the despatch of French Jews to the death camps, Louis Darquier (Jonathan Cape, 2006).

  She is currently working on Oh Happy Day: A Story about the life and times of her ancestors from England, Ireland and Lebanon, and their emigration to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century.

• Justin Cartwright
  

  Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and educated in the United States and at Trinity College, Oxford. He went on to work in advertising as a copywriter and progressed to making documentary films on a number of subjects, as various as the Dead Sea Scrolls and lions hunting at night in Africa.

  He has written 12 novels, including In Every Face I Meet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995, and Leading the Cheers, which won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1998. Five of his novels have been shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award.  The Promise of Happiness won the Hawthornden Prize in 2005 and the Sunday Times of South Africa’s Literary Prize. The Song Before It Is Sung, published in 2007, was praised as a "quiet masterpiece" by the Los Angeles Times and won the inaugural Jewish Cultural Award.  

  He has also written two works of non-fiction, one an Oxford memoir, This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited for Bloomsbury’s Writer in the City series. 

  He is a critic and a frequent contributor to BBC’s Front Row and other cultural programmes.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.