Award, set up as literary antidote to the Booker, will halt its £40,000 prize as hunt for new sponsorship goes on

The Folio prize, set up to challenge a “dumbed down” Man Booker in 2011, is to be suspended for a year while its directors continue to search for a new sponsor.

It was announced in spring that publisher the Folio Society would not be renewing its backing after two years, during which the £40,000 award was won by the short story writer George Saunders and novelist Akhil Sharma.

The prize is open to English-language fiction from around the world, with the longlist proposed by an “academy” of authors and critics from which each year’s judging panel is drawn.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Second to none or second to last? … George Saunders won the 2014 Folio Prize for his book Tenth Of December. Photograph: Ian West/PA

A statement on the prize website said: “As we continue our work to secure a new sponsor for the Folio Prize, we have decided not to run a prize in March 2016. Instead, we are concentrating our resources on another promising development for the spring, while at the same time exploring how the prize might best fulfil its aim of bringing great books to readers in the future.”

The award was announced as the Literature prize in 2011, at a time when the Man Booker prize jury had been accused of “dumbing down”. Part of its USP was to admit American writers at a a time when the Booker was only open to writers from the Commonwealth.



Co-founder Andrew Kidd wrote at the time that “a space has opened up for a new prize in the UK that celebrates excellence and is judged by experts in the field of literature”.

The Booker responded in 2014 by widening its remit to include fiction in English from across the globe, raising questions as to whether there was a need for another prize for literary fiction.

The Folio is the youngest of several prizes currently in sponsorship limbo. The Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction said in May that it was looking for a new backer after its anonymous sponsor had pulled out. In the same month, the Dublin-based Impac prize – which, with a purse of €100,000, is one of the world’s richest literary awards – announced that it too was seeking a new sponsor.