The judges for the prestigious and lucrative Man Booker Prize 2019 have been announced.
A “stunning” five-strong panel has been selected to assess the best of long-form fiction in English, and choose the finest work for the coveted accolade and its £50,000 prize.
The director of the Hay Festival, Peter Florence, chairs the otherwise female panel, which boasts literary, musical, publishing and journalistic expertise.
Publisher Liz Calder, novelist Xiaolu Guo, former Guardian journalist Afua Hirsch, and pianist and conductor Joanna MacGregor, have been chosen to sit in judgment for next year’s prize.
.@hayfestival has released early bird tickets for the 2019 festival and #ManBooker2018 winner Anna Burns will be there. Stay tuned for their full programme release in March. #FinestFiction https://t.co/5EE6pPFt4d
— Man Booker Prize (@ManBookerPrize) December 4, 2018
Anna Burns won the 2018 prize for her novel, Milkman, which enjoyed a sharp increase in sales following this year’s prize ceremony
Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “The collective brainpower and creative spirit of this year’s panel is stunning, and the judges’ commitment to high quality literature boundless.
“I’m looking forward to seeing this varied group in action, and to hearing the ways in which their private reading will become a public act, bringing great books to the notice of others.”
Florence founded the Hay Festival, which has attracted millions of book-lovers to Hay-on-Wye in its 32-year history.
Calder, whose list contained the likes of Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, has also been selected to judge the next array of literary offerings.
She will be joined by lawyer and writer Hirsch, who worked for The Guardian and as an education editor for Sky News. In 2017 she called for the removal of Nelson’s column and called the admiral a white supremacist.
British-Chinese writer Guo has written numerous novels, and been prize-nominated for her work as a filmmaker.
Pianist Joanna MacGregor is head of piano at the Royal Academy of Music, and has conducted numerous shows since her debut in 2002.
The panel follows in the footsteps of former chairman Kwame Anthony Appiah, and judges Jacqueline Rose, Val McDermid, Leo Robson and Leanne Shapton.
Together the panel will judge long-form fiction published by UK and Irish publishers, written in English, and published in the UK between October 1 2018, and September 30 2019.