From Folio to Hatchet Job: the book prizes we have lost in 2016

Costa offers ray of sunshine in bleak prize-giving year as industry sponsors pull out

For those who enjoy the “posh bingo” of book awards, this is an unusually bleak midwinter. A year ago, denizens of the Westminster lobby and the book world gathered in London’s giant Imax cinema for the Paddy Power political book awards, and a week later the Folio prize shortlist was unveiled. Neither will take place in 2016 because the sponsors have respectively come to the end of their agreed term and pulled out (among those disappointed will be Lord Ashcroft, also a backer of the Paddy Power awards, whose David Cameron biography has been denied its chance of silverware). Organisers talk hopefully of reviving both awards under different names, but there are few precedents for a comeback after such a hiatus.

Another winter casualty appears to be the Hatchet Job of the Year prize, last given in February 2014, but the thinning out is happening in the warmer months, too. The Independent foreign fiction prize will also disappear as a name and separate entity, as it is being incorporated into the Man Booker International prize. Jim Crace, the 20th winner of the €100,000 International Impac Dublin literary award in 2015, could well be the last as Impac and its trust fund are no more (though the prize retained the same name last year, Crace’s cash was from Dublin alone). “There is absolutely no sign of a [new] sponsor whatsoever,” said a city councillor at the time of the ceremony.

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