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The Booker Prize: Stories, Successes and Scandals

10 weekly sessions online, on Mondays at 6 - 8pm, starting from Monday 26 January.

Overview

This course is delivered asynchronously online, supported by discussion board moderated by the tutor. Material will be released each Monday, which you will be able to work through at your own pace, engaging with the tutor and your classmates to discuss the various topics.

Each week, you will be given access to:

  • A podcast-style audio-recording through which the tutor will introduce the main concepts and themes for the week
  • A reading and/or video that adds depth to the introductory recording
  • An activity or exercise relating to the learning materials above
  • A discussion board to which you will post responses to the activity, moderated by the tutor

Explore the Booker Prize, Britain’s (if not the world’s) premier literary award. Expert Naomi Adam will show you how to appreciate ‘Booker’-quality work through the lenses of linguistics, literary criticism, and creative writing. Winning authors’ work will provide case studies, giving participants the opportunity to contemplate exactly what makes an award-winning book. This immersive course features tutor-led and interactive content, and on completion, students might even feel compelled to start crafting their own novels with ‘Booker’-quality potential! No prior experience of literary studies required—just a love of books!

Syllabus

  1. Introduction
    1. A brief history of the Booker Prize
  2. Rules and Regulations
    1. Surveying the Booker Prize’s continually shifting and often convoluted rules and regulations  
  3. Rules Are Made To Be Broken
    1. Considering the scandals attached to the Booker Prize over the years, with rule-bending and rule-breaking by both the judging panel and the award-winning authors themselves
  4. Drawing the Shortlist Straw
    1. Zeroing in on the six Booker-shortlisted novels for a single year
  5. All About ‘You’
    1. Investigating the place of the pronoun you across past Booker Prize winners
  6. A Sense of Place
    1. Different approaches to describing a destination that has inspired several Booker Prize-winning authors
  7. Into the (At)wood
    1. Margaret Atwood vs. the Booker Prize
  8. Word Up!
    1. Exploring how dialect is represented within Booker Prize-winning novels
  9. From Page to Stage (and/or Screen)
    1. Investigating adaptations of Booker Prize-winning novels across media: from page to screen and/or stage.
  10. Going Global
    1. Wrapping up the course by looking at the Booker Prize’s offshoots, including the Man Asian Prize (obsolete) and the International Booker Prize (ongoing)

Course lecturer

Dr Naomi Adam is a researcher in Literary Linguistics, and has taught at the Universities of Liverpool and Nottingham. Her research interests span award-winning, contemporary and global literature, cognitive poetics, and fictolinguistics. She has had articles published in Babel: The Language Magazine, English Text Construction and Language and Literature, among other outlets. Her monograph Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Naomi also acts as production manager of the Journal of Languages, Texts, and Society and editor of Parlance, the newsletter of the Poetics and Linguistics Association. 

Course fee

  • Standard fee: £155
  • Concession fee: £80