Man Group, a hedge fund company, has announced that it will discontinue its eighteen-year relationship with the Booker Prize, the UK’s leading literary prize, after the year 2020, leading to serious speculation about the future of the prize.
Talking about the decision, Luke Ellis, Man Group’s chief executive, said that it had been a privilege to sponsor the prize for nearly two decades but following careful consideration of their funding initiatives, the group had decided to focus its resources on its “Paving the Way” diversity and inclusion campaign, and also on the Man Charitable Trust, which supports literacy and numeracy.
The Chair of the Booker foundation, Helena Kennedy, said, “We would like to put on record the foundation’s appreciation of Man Group’s sponsorship. However, all good things must come to an end and we looked forward to taking the prizes into the next phase with our new supporter.”
The Man group has been part of the Booker prize since 2002 and has sponsored the Man Booker International Prize since it began in 2005, paying £ 1.6 million for the £ 50, 000 prize. Their tenure as financial backers of Britain’s most prestigious literary prize has seen occasional criticism levelled at them from publishers and authors. Novelist Sebastian Faulks criticized the Man Group last year, terming them as “the enemy” and as “not the sort of people who should be sponsoring literary prizes; they’re the kind of people literary prizes ought to be criticizing.”
Ellis had responded back, stating that Faulks’s criticism “come at a time when the arts are experiencing an unprecedented withdrawal of public funding. Literature and the arts need their champions to step in where public money has been pulled out.”
The Booker Prize foundation has already assured that their trustees are in talks with new sponsors and that they are “confident that new funding will be in place for 2020.”
