Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet and Paul Beatty might be competing for the Man Booker prize and a £50,000 cheque if they win next month, but readers around the world are being offered the opportunity to vie for their own literary award – where the winner will “never have to buy a book again”.

Launched on Friday by independent London bookshop Heywood Hill to mark its 80th anniversary, the Library of a Lifetime award will give its winner “one newly published and hand-picked hardback book per month, for life, delivered anywhere in the world”.

To win, readers must nominate the book that has meant the most to them, with the winner chosen at random in a prize draw. The title must have been published in English, or translated into English, after 1936, the year Heywood Hill was founded. The Mayfair shop, which sells a mix of new, old and antiquarian titles, was founded by George Heywood Hill, with the help of the woman who would become his wife, Anne Gathorne-Hardy, on 3 August 1936.

Karin Scherer, senior Heywood Hill bookseller, said that “for the winner it will be an intellectual adventure of a lifetime … Every reader in the world will want to know about this life-changing prize. Whoever wins the first prize will never have to buy a book again. Instead they can look forward to a lifelong relationship with our bookshop and our booksellers.”

Authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Donna Leon and William Boyd have already put forward their own nominations, with Ishiguro plumping for Dostoevsky’s The Devils, calling “every character bonkers”, Leon for Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy because “it’s wonderfully funny” and Boyd for Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which he said was “unique, mind-boggling, hilarious”.

The prize is inspired by Heywood Hill’s A Year in Books subscription service, which offers users a reading consultation with the shop’s booksellers to determine their interests, and then a new book each month. One customer in Connecticut, said the shop, has received a monthly book from Heywood Hill for the last 40 years.

“Every person is different. Before we start, we will sit down with the prize winner and find out their reading preferences, and any likes and dislikes,” said Scherer.

Second prize will be a one-year subscription to A Year in Books, and third prize a hardback book every other month for a year. Heywood Hill said that once the competition closes on 31 October, it will use the entries to pull together a list of books covering the last 80 years of English-language fiction and nonfiction.