Its knack for creating tension and controversy has helped it remain an energising force in publishing for more than 50 years - but how do writers, publishers and judges cope with the annual agony of the Booker?
In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild - from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life. Read more
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
The plot: Under lock and key until publication day on 10 September, The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale and follows the lives of three women in Gilead.
What we said: Nothing yet! But it is set to be one of the biggest books of the year.
Most readers will have to wait until September to find out what happens in Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, but the Booker judges have deemed The Testaments worthy of a place on the 2019 longlist for the £50,000 literary prize.
The Booker Prize will be sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz's charitable foundation Crankstart in a five-year deal, it has been announced. But the Booker Prize has said it will not use the opportunity of the change in sponsor to reverse its controversial decision to allow US writers to enter the award.
Previous Man Booker prize winners are among those keenly awaiting the announcement of the new sponsor of the prestigious literary award, after the prize's sponsor of almost two decades, Man Group, became the latest in a wave of companies pulling out of backing book prizes. Read more
Despite being described by the chair of the Man Booker prize judges as "challenging", Anna Burns's story of sexual intimidation during the Troubles, Milkman, has proved a hit with readers, its sales soaring in the first days after winning the prize. Read more
Every year, there is a controversy at the Man Booker prize; this year, it is all about the work of editors. Or rather, the supposed lack of work that editors are doing.
former slave's travels, a violent Swat-team arrest, a war between humans and trees... Esi Edugyan, Rachel Kushner, Daisy Johnson, Robin Robertson, Richard Powers and Anna Burns on the real stories behind their novels.
Rows, gaffes and disdainful speeches - the Booker prize has always been in the news. But now, a creeping sense of bad decision-making is undermining its cachet.
'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
Kate Thompson was horrified to discover that her book, The Sunday Times bestseller, A Mother's Promise, had been plagiarised and rewritten by AI - just days after publication. And then it happened again.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright OfficeThe US copyright office has information on its website about how to register and what advantages there are in doing so. www.copyright.gov/register/, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020.
Protection of copyright has always been a top priority for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, and that point was driven home again during the organization's annual meeting held via Zoom on May 8. Read more
Mark Price has said he has been advised that there are "two grounds on which a legal case could realistically be pursued" against Meta in the UK for the company's use of pirated books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more
When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford's Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Read more
'Writing is not a job description. A great deal of it is luck. Don't do it if you are not a gambler because a lot of people devote many years of their lives to it (for little reward). I think people become writers because they are compulsive wordsmiths.'