Booker Prize 2019: Some interesting facts about the literary honour

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*It was first awarded in 1969. PH Newby won it for Something to Answer For.

*The Booker Prize is awarded to the best novel written in English that year, and published in UK or Ireland. Meanwhile, the International Booker Prize is awarded to a book translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. The prize money is equally divided between the author and translator.

*Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger (2008), Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things (1997) are the three Indian authors who have won this honour in the past.

*Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Man Booker Prize in 1981. In 1993, it also won the Booker of Bookers as the best novel to win the Prize in the first 25 years of the inception of the Man Booker Prize. In 2008, it went on to win the Best of the Booker award that celebrated the 40th year of the prize.

*Hilary Mantel is the only female author and the first British author to have won the prize twice. In 2009, Wolf Hall, a fictional retelling of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and in 2012, the second part of the Cromwell trilogy Bring Up the Bodies won the coveted prize.