Noted British-Indian composer and musician Nitin Sawhney, who has scored music in over 70 films, including Warner bros’ ‘Mowgli’ and ‘Midnight’s Children’, was on Thursday announced as one of the judges for the 2024 Booker Prize.
Sawhney, 59, will join artist and author Edmund de Waal, chair of the panel, along with novelist Sara Collins, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and writer and professor Yiyun Li, as submissions opened for the most coveted literary prize.
The five-member panel will be looking for the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.
“Honoured to be a @TheBookerPrizes judge for 2024,” Sawhney, who was made CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours, wrote on X on Thursday.
A recipient of the Ivor Novello 2017 Lifetime Achievement award, Sawhney has recorded multiple albums and over 70 film and TV scores.
These include adaptations of the 1981 Booker Prize winner ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie and ‘The Namesake’ by Booker-shortlisted novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as ‘Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle’, ‘Human Planet’.
The musical genius holds eight honorary doctorates from UK universities and sits on the boards of multiple charities, including Complicite.
For the last four years he has been the Chair of the PRS Foundation, the UK’s funding body for new music and talent development, as well as being a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts and the Grammy Awards.
A regular cultural and political commentator, he has written articles for all the major UK broadsheets and is due to release an anthology of his written work next year.
His latest album, ‘IDENTITY’, for Warner Music, was released in October 2023.
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced in July 2024, with the shortlist of six books to follow in September.
The winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced in November with the winner receiving 50,000 British pounds as well as the 2,500 British pounds awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.
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