THE director of Hay Festival has been announced as the chair of the panel of judges that decides the winners of the 2019 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The announcement that Peter Florence would head the panel was made public on Tuesday (December 1).
The panel consists of former fiction publisher and editor Liz Calder, novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch and pianist and composer Joanna MacGregor.
The Man Booker prize is awarded annually for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.
The panel’s role is to select the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books and then a smaller shortlist, from which the winner will be chosen.
The ‘Man Booker Dozen’ will be announced in July next year and the shortlist of six books in early September. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced in October 2019 at an awards ceremony at London’s Guildhall, broadcast live by the BBC. After the news was made public, Mr Florence said the role was recognition of Hay Festival’s status as one of the country’s leading literature festivals, and he promised to bring other panel members to Wales.
“I am really excited about what it might bring to Hay – in terms of what I’ll learn, but also about the possibility of bringing the prize out of London for a holiday,” he said.
“I want to invite my fellow judges up here to the bookshops and mountains. It’s the world’s best place to read!”For the full story see this week's Brecon & Radnor Express