From Hilary Mantel to Kazuo Ishiguro, 15 past winners of the Man Booker prize will be uniting for the first time to take part in a festival this summer to mark 50 years of the prestigious literary award.
Taking place from 6 to 8 July, the Man Booker 50 festival will feature more than 60 speakers, with unusual pairings and panels: Mantel and Pat Barker will discuss whether historical fiction can shed light on the present; Alan Hollinghurst and Marlon James will compare their portrayals of gay sexuality; Anne Enright, David Grossman and James, meanwhile, will discuss the future of the novel.
Among other highlights, Paul Beatty, Eleanor Catton, Deborah Levy and Graeme Macrae Burnet will look at experiments in literary form, while Peter Carey and Julian Barnes will discuss their influences and storytelling techniques. A rare public appearance by mother and daughter authors Anita and Kiran Desai will see the nominee and winner, respectively, discuss writing across the generations.
The event, which is run in partnership with the Southbank Centre, will culminate with the result of the public vote for the Golden Man Booker prize, a one-off award for the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the competition. Five judges are currently reading the winning novels from each decade of the prize, with each to choose the “best” winner from each decade. The five books will be revealed on 26 May, and the public will then be asked to vote for their favourite. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker in 1981, picked up the Booker of Bookers twice: for the prize’s 25th anniversary in 1993 and for its 40th in 2008.
Booker Prize Foundation chair Helena Kennedy said the festival would “acknowledge the prize’s past, present and future, celebrating the last 50 years of authors, looking ahead to the new voices of the literary stage and recognising the power of the art form”.
Southbank Centre’s Ted Hodgkinson said the festival would be “a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of literary brilliance”.
“Such a rare convergence of world renowned writers spanning genres, geographies and decades of the Man Booker prize signifies an important moment to take stock of why novels matter and how they have captured our changing world over half a century,” he said.
Other Booker prize alumni to appear at the festival include Roddy Doyle, Howard Jacobson, Penelope Lively, Michael Ondaatje, Colm Tóibín and DBC Pierre.
