Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize | |
---|---|
Awarded for | Best business book proposal by an author under 35 |
Sponsored by | Financial Times McKinsey & Company |
Location | London / New York |
Reward(s) | £15,000 |
First awarded | 2014 |
The Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize (or simply the Bracken Bower Prize) is an annual award given to the best business book proposal of the year by a young writer, as determined by the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company. It aims to find the "best proposal for a book about the challenges and opportunities of growth by an author aged under 35".[1]
Established in 2014, the prize is named after Brendan Bracken, chairman of the Financial Times from 1945 to 1958, and Marvin Bower, managing director of McKinsey from 1950 to 1967.[2] The prize is worth £15,000 and is presented at the same time as the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.[3]
Several previous winners and finalists of the contest have landed book deals with major publishers.[4][5] Siddarth Shrikanth, finalist for the 2020 prize, secured publishing deals with Duckworth Books and Penguin Random House for his book, The Case for Nature.[6][7] Winner of the 2019 Prize, Jonathan Hillman had his book on China's global infrastructure expansion, The Digital Silk Road: China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future, published by Harper Business.[8] Cambridge University Press published the book by 2018 Prize Winner Andrew Leon Hanna, 25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs, which tells the story of three Syrian women entrepreneurs in the Za'atari refugee camp and of refugee entrepreneurs around the world.[9][10] From the same cohort, finalist Christian Busch had his book, published as The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, released by Riverhead Books.
From the 2016 cohort, Kogan Page published Blockchain Babel: The Crypto Craze and the Challenge to Business by finalist Igor Pejic.[11][12] Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published venture capitalist and Bracken Bower finalist Scott Hartley's book, The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, a Financial Times Business Book of the Month that was mentioned on the longlist for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award in 2017.[13][14] Published in paperback by Mariner Books, it has been acquired by Penguin Random House in India, and translated into Portuguese and Korean.[15][16][17]
Among the 2015 cohort, Penguin Press agreed to publish Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, a book about the changing nature of failure in business and life, by 2015 Prize Winners and former derivates trader Christopher Clearfield and University of Toronto professor András Tilcsik.[18][19][4] Meltdown won Canada's National Business Book Award in 2019. Irene Yuan Sun's short-listed proposal for a book about China's economic role in Africa was picked up by Harvard Business Review Press.[19]
The prize also led to a publishing deal for Saadia Zahidi, the first-ever Bracken Bower Prize winner in 2014; Nation Books acquired a book based on her proposal, Womenomics in the Muslim World, in 2015, and it was retitled Fifty Million Rising: The New Generation of Working Women Transforming the Muslim World.[4]
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