Local authors among academy members for new £40,000 Folio Prize
Local authors including Peter Carey, J M Coetzee and Anna Funder are among more than 110 members of an academy that will select the winner of the inaugural Folio Prize in the UK in 2014.
The Folio Society has been revealed as the major sponsor of the new prize, which was previously known as the Literature Prize, reports the Bookseller. The £40,000 (approximately A$58,000) prize was announced in 2011 by Aitken Alexander managing director and agent Andrew Kidd and will be presented for books published in the UK, with no restriction on the writer’s country of origin or the genre of the work.
Other Australians in the judging academy are authors James Bradley, Chloe Hooper, Nam Le, Elliot Perlman and Carrie Tiffany, and Australian-born critic and former publisher Carmen Callil. New Zealand author Emily Perkins is also a member of the academy, which includes well-known international authors such as Margaret Atwood, A S Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. The academy also includes literary critics from publications such as the Guardian, the Irish Times, Granta, the Sunday Times, Paris Review, London Review of Books and the New Yorker.
The inaugural Folio Prize will be presented in March 2014 for books published in the UK between 1 January and 31 December 2013. Each member of the judging academy will nominate three titles, with 60 finalists then selected from this list via a mathematical formula. The academy will also select an additional 20 titles from publishers’ nominations. Books by academy members can be nominated for the prize, however, academy members cannot nominate their own books and must withdraw from the judging process if one of their books is nominated.
Five judges will then be selected from the academy, three from the UK and two from outside of the UK, with no more than three members of the same gender to be included on the judging panel. The judges will then select a shortlist of eight titles, which will be announced in February 2014.
The Folio Society will also publish an special edition illustrated hardback of the winning book. For more information about the Folio Prize, read a feature article from the Bookseller here.
Tags: awardsfolioprizeuk
Category: Local news
