Crace, Shukla and Summerscale to judge Rathbones Folio Prize 2018

Novelists Jim Crace and Nikesh Shukla and writer Kate Summerscale are to be the judges of next year's Rathbones Folio Prize.

The £20,000 prize, which will recognise the best work of literature published in the UK in 2017, will be awarded on 14th May.

The Rathbones Folio Prize is the only literary prize in which all the books considered are selected and judged by an academy of peers. Prize co-founders Andrew Kidd and Kate Harvey commented: "We are thrilled that Jim, Kate and Nikesh have agreed to take on the exciting challenge of determining the very best book of 2017. Their own work reflects the extraordinary range of subject, theme, form and voice that make up the academy, and we can't wait to see what emerges from three outstanding writers' close reading and careful deliberation."

Hisham Matar won the 2017 prize for his book The Return (Viking), following a relaunch which saw the prize remit widened to encompass fiction, non-fiction and poetry for the first time.

Crace is the author of 11 books, including Harvest (Picador), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A new novel, The Melody, will be published by Picador next February. Shukla is the author of Coconut Unlimited (Quartet), shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and editor of influential essay collection The Good Immigrant (Unbound), as well as crowdfunding new quarterly literary magazine The Good Journal. Summerscale, a former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury) and a Somerset Maugham Award for The Queen of Whale Cay (Fourth Estate).