Frozen food retailer Iceland will end its sponsorship of the Booker Prize, heralding the end of one of the longest running corporate sponsorship deals in Britain.
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Bill Grimsey, group CEO, is expected to announce at the awards ceremony for the literary prize on Wednesday that continuing with the sponsorship does not make commercial sense. Responsibility for the prize was inherited as the result of a buyout of cash and carry retailer Booker last year.
Martyn Goff, administrator of the prize, told the Daily Telegraph: “There is no danger that the prize will be lost. We want it to be sponsored by somebody else. It would still be the Booker Prize, but it would have ‘sponsored by Barclays Bank’, or whatever, written underneath.”
The Booker Prize has been running since 1968, when publisher Tom Maschler approached Booker Brothers for sponsorship.
