Man Booker Prize unaffected by Tesco-Booker merger

The Man Booker Prize is unaffected by Tesco’s merger with The Booker Group, its organisers have clarified.

The supermarket has agreed to buy the UK’s biggest food wholesaler, Booker Group, which owns Premier, Budgens and Londis shops convenience shops, for £3.7bn, it announced today.

However, The Booker Prize Foundation, which awards the annual Man Booker Prize For Fiction and its sister Man Booker International Prize, is an “entirely separate” independent charity set up in 2002. It has a perpetual licence to the name The Booker Prize, which is sponsored by the Man Group. A spokesperson for the prize said: “It is very much business as usual.”

Booker founded the literary prize in 1968 and sponsored the prize until the Man Group took over in 2002.

Mark Chilton, Booker Group company secretary, remains on the Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction was won last year by Paul Beatty for The Sellout, published by Oneworld, which also published 2015 Man Booker winner Marlon James' A Brief History Of Seven Killings.