Booker Prize receives new funder in Silicon Valley billionaire Michael Moritz, its founder for the first time

Silicon Valley billionaire Michael Moritz and the Crankstart charitable foundation His wife Harriet Heyman The directors announced Thursday the Booker Prize.

This announcement comes a month after the Man group announced that it was putting an end to the sponsorship of the prestigious prize of literary fiction.

The new arrangement will take effect on June 1 after 2019. The announcement of the winner of the Man Booker International Award, which will also mark the end of the 18-year sponsorship of the Man Group, announced the Booker Prize Foundation.

The original price will again be known as the Booker Prize, while the price for translation literature will become the Booker International Prize.

"We are delighted that the Booker Awards have found such philanthropic supporters in Crankstart, whose founders share our vision and values.With its support, we look forward to developing initiatives for The Booker to reach new levels. of all generations and all walks of life around the world, "said Helena Kennedy, Chair of the Booker Award Foundation, in a statement.

with the support of Crankstart, they will be able to continue the charity activities of the Booker Prize Foundation.

She stated that the foundation would work with the National Literacy Trust in prisons and with the Royal Institute for Blind People (RNIB), one of the leading British charities specializing in vision loss, so to make the list accessible to blind and visually impaired readers, as well as in British universities.

Crankstart was created by Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman in 2000 with the aim of supporting the "forgotten, disinherited". , the unfortunate, the oppressed and the causes where help makes all the difference. "

" We can not imagine a day when we did not spend the time reading a book. The Booker Awards are a way to publicize the ideas, discoveries, pleasures and joy that come out of great fiction, "said Moritz, a British capitalist and author, born in Wales.

Crankstart organizes and supports scholarship funds for students from low-income families, Oxford University and the University of Chicago, among others.

The award of 50,000 books is among the most coveted literary honors and, apart from the global recognition enjoyed by award-winning novels, the price also In the week following the announcement of the winners in 2017, for example, sales George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo" rose by 1,227 percent.

The list of winners includes many of the giants of the last five decades, from Salman Rushdie to Margaret Atwood, to Iris Murdoch to JM Coetzee, the award also made tribute to many writers early in their careers, including Eleanor Catton, Aravind Adiga and Ben Okri. [19659004] The award also contributed to the international recognition of renowned Indian novelists such as Arundhati Roy (1997 winner of "The God of Little Things" award), Kiran Desai (2006 winner of the "Heritage of Loss" award), Aravind Adiga (2009 winner for "The White Tiger"), with Amitav Ghosh, Anuradha Roy and Jeet Thayil, whose novels have been selected in the past.