Commonwealth Book Prize

Commonwealth Book Prize, any of the annual literary prizes awarded from 1987 to 2013 by the Commonwealth Foundation, an organization comprising most member countries of the Commonwealth.

The awards were established in 1987 as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Initially two honours, best book and best first book, were awarded to fiction writers working in English in each of four regions: Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, Europe and South Asia, and Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Each regional competition was judged by a committee composed of literary figures from that region. The regional finalists for best book were then compared by a panel consisting of the chairs of the four regional competitions to determine the overall winner. The prize for overall best first book was added in 1989. The Macquarie Group Foundation, a charitable extension of Australian banking and investment firm Macquarie Group, provided partial financial support, with the regional divisions of the competition open to sponsorship by other organizations.

In 2011 the prize became the Commonwealth Book Prize. It was reconceptualized as an honour for best first book only, with one overall winner drawn from the regional winners from Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. After 2013 the prize was no longer awarded. Commonwealth Writers, the branch of the Commonwealth Foundation that organized the prize, instead directed its resources to a short story award created in 2012.

Notable winners of the prize included Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Rohinton Mistry, J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Kate Grenville.