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Start Date
31 January, 2025
There will be 10 weekly meetings on Friday, 5 -7pm, starting from 31 January.
Overview
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
Week 1 – Introduction
A brief history of the Booker Prize
Week 2 – Rules and Regulations
Surveying the Booker Prize’s continually shifting and often convoluted rules and regulations
Week 3 – Rules Are Made To Be Broken
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
Week 4 – Drawing the Shortlist Straw
Zeroing in on the six Booker-shortlisted novels for a single year
Week 5 – All About ‘You’
Investigating the place of the pronoun you across past Booker Prize winners
Week 6 – A Sense of Place
Different approaches to describing a destination that has inspired several Booker Prize-winning authors
Week 7 – Into the (At)wood
Margaret Atwood vs. the Booker Prize
Week 8 – Word Up!
Exploring how dialect is represented within Booker Prize-winning novels
Week 9 – From Page to Stage (and/or Screen)
Investigating adaptations of Booker Prize-winning novels across media: from page to screen and/or stage.
Week 10 – Going Global
Wrapping up the course by looking at the Booker Prize’s offshoots, including the Man Asian Prize (obsolete) and the International Booker Prize (ongoing)
Please note that the ‘last date available to book’ date is only a guide. We reserve the right to close bookings earlier if courses are over- or under-subscribed. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure enrol as soon as possible. Registrations will not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm.
Course Lecturer: Dr Naomi Adam
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, and is currently working on a monograph titled Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. 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. She is unwilling to limit herself to a single favourite era, with Red, reputation and evermore as her top three.
Courses fees: Full fee £155/Concession £80.
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