Man Booker Prize 2011: All the Booker Prize winners, and the 2011 longlist ~ Technology Update

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Man Booker Prize 2011: All the Booker Prize winners, and the 2011 longlist

8:20 AM latest techno report No comments

Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

The Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced. Does winning guarantee a boost in sales? And which of the previous winners has sold most? We look at the sales data for every winner since 1969
• Get the data

The Man Booker Prize 2011 longlist has been announced, with Alan Hollinghurst the early favourite to scoop the prize come October.

The Guardian Books Blog got it right when it predicted nominations for Hollinghurst and Julian Barnes, but there were some surprise inclusions too.

Last year the Booker was won by Howard Jacobson for his comic novel The Finkler Question.

But does winning the Booker Prize guarantee an author a boom in sales? Last October we pulled together Nielsen BookScan's sales figures of all 43 winners of the title since its inception in 1969 (the prize was a tie in 1974 and again in 1992).

Nielsen's data runs from 1998 onwards, so sales of older books aren't directly comparable, but the runaway winner of recent years is Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which won in 2002 and has taken over £9m and sold 1.3m copies so far, more than twice as many as Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things in second place.

A look at the spreadsheet also reveals that Jonathan Cape is the publisher to sign to if you want to improve your chances of winning the Booker - seven of the previous winning novels have come from them, closely followed by Faber & Faber with six. By that reckoning, Julian Barnes and Sebastian Barry lead the charge.

And if you really have your heart set on a Booker, the words to include in the title of your novel are Sea, Ha, God, Tiger and Road, as our Wordle shows.

Check out the spreadsheet for sales figures of all the previous winners, as well as links to book reviews and data on the 2010 shortlist and 2011 longlist. Let's see what you can do.