Inside the Booker Prize: arguments, agonies and carefully encouraged scandals | Booker prize | The Guardian

From Rushdie's victory onwards, life has changed dramatically for most of the authors who have won the prize. (In the early days this was "an Oscar-type thing", as an internal memo referred to it: a vaguely art-deco, female figure holding aloft a shallow dish, more than half a metre tall.) "It made it possible for me to live by my work, which I have done ever since," Rushdie told me. When Ben Okri heard his name announced a decade later, at a banquet at Guildhall in London, "I got up, walked slowly, in a dreamlike way, past all these tables and made my way across," he told me. "You could divide my literary life in that walk."

The prize today is worth £50,000 and a guaranteed surge in sales. It remains transformative for its winner. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was already a bestseller when it won in 2009; even so, she told me, "You feel your status change overnight". Bernardine Evaristo, who won jointly with Margaret Atwood in 2019, is, two years on, still busy with press interviews.