Authors: The Booker prize doesn’t need a Man!

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In other news about awards, one of literature’s most prominent ones has lost its title sponsor.

The Man Group hedge fund has sponsored — you guessed it — the Man Booker Prize since 2002; it announced Sunday that it would no longer do so.

According to the Guardian, the Booker Prize Foundation’s trustees are already in discussions with a new sponsor and the organization is “confident that new funding will be in place for 2020.”

Assuming they’re correct, it doesn’t seem as though many authors or members of the publishing world are sorry to see Man Group go.

Under its sponsorship, the prize underwent several large changes, most infamously the expansion of eligibility to American authors in 2014.

Previously, it was limited to writers from the British Commonwealth.

The Man Booker Prize (or whatever it ends up being called) goes to “what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK.”

Most recently, that book was Milkman, by Anna Burns.

Read more about the reaction to Man Group’s departure and speculation over the reasons in the Guardian.

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