Dear potential colleague,
Thank you for considering joining the Booker Prize Foundation’s small, dynamic and growing team.
You will perhaps be familiar with the 53 year-old Booker Prize – its status as the leading literary prize in the anglophone world, its life-altering effect on the winner, its knack for identifying future classics. You may also know about its sister prize, the International Booker Prize, which is awarded annually for a work of fiction in translation. But you are likely to know little about the Booker Prize Foundation’s wider work – in libraries, schools, universities and prisons.
If the latter is true, then you will understand the need to cement our charitable purpose in the minds of readers. If the former is the case you will know that our impact is global, that our responsibility to book-lovers everywhere is significant and that the potential for us to bring them together through a shared love of reading is enormous.
You are, in other words, perfectly placed to help us underpin and expand our mission at one of the most transformative times in the Booker’s history.
You will see from the detailed job description that our Director of Finance and Operations is a key operational role. Despite the Booker’s renown and longevity it has never had a full-time in-house team, so you will be helping me build a newly staffed organisation from scratch. We are looking for someone who relishes both our ambitious purpose and the detailed work involved.
Equity is fundamental to our intentions. The Booker Prize can change lives through literature. The way we do this is by rewarding what we consider to be the best new fiction. But what does ‘best’ mean, and who gets to decide? We work hard in seeking a range of perspectives at the decision-making stage. In order to complement that outlook on the judging panel we intend to build an organisation that is structured for diversity of thought and equity of access.
An experienced and qualified finance professional, the ideal candidate will have a fondness for the arts, and will understand the Booker to be part of culture in its broadest sense. As for the culture of the team under construction, the future Director of Finance and Operations must subscribe to the view that it should be collegiate, considerate, productive and warm.
There can be no better place to begin.
In hope and with best,
Gaby Wood
Director
Booker Prize Foundation