Man Group cuts ties with Booker Prize after spending review
Quoted hedge fund manager will divert funds to projects that improve diversity
Man Group, the London-listed hedge fund, has pulled its multimillion-pound sponsorship of the Booker Prize, leaving one of the English language’s most prestigious literary awards without a commercial sponsor.
The decision to sever the 18-year relationship, which has seen the asset manager plough more than £25m into the prize since 2002, came after a review of charitable spending by Man, which is one of the world’s largest listed hedge funds.
It concluded that it would instead dedicate donations to improving diversity within financial services, according to a statement this weekend by Man’s chief executive, Luke Ellis.
But Man’s sponsorship was also controversial, with some prominent authors decrying a big City firm’s involvement. The 2014 move to widen the prize to capture writers from the United States was also contentious.
“It has been a privilege to sponsor the Man Booker Prize for nearly two decades,” said Mr Ellis. “The Man Booker Prizes have meant a huge amount to all of us at Man Group and I want to take the opportunity to applaud the exceptional work of the Booker Prize Foundation.”
The foundation’s trustees — who include Helena Kennedy QC, the human-rights barrister, and Ben Okri, the 1991 prizewinner — said the prizes would run as normal this year, that the foundation was “confident” that another sponsor would be in place by 2020 and that it was currently in “discussions with a new sponsor”.
Baroness 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 look forward to taking the prizes into the next phase with our new supporter.”
The fiction prize is the UK’s most prestigious literary prize and is eligible to any novel published in the UK and Ireland, written in English. Last year was the first when novels published in Ireland were eligible.
In 2013, it was announced that the prize — previously only open to writers from the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe — would be opened up to include US and other global writers in 2014. Since then, two American writers, George Saunders for Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017 and Paul Beatty in 2016 for The Sellout, have taken the prize.
Since it was first awarded in 1969, the brainchild of the publisher Tom Maschler and the late Martyn Goff, a bookseller-turned-literary entrepreneur, 50 prizes have been handed out.
Winning authors have included Kingsley Amis, who said he would spend the prize money on “booze! and curtains”, Margaret Atwood, and Yann Martel who received the prize for The Life of Pi in 2002, the first year that Man sponsored the award.