Over the past forty years, writing by postcolonial writers in Britain and the former British colonies has attracted numerous prestigious literary prizes. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the Australian novelist Patrick White, the Nigerian playwright, poet and novelist Wole Soyinka, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott, the Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul, the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (and earlier in the century to the Irish writers W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett). Since its inception in 1969, nearly half of the winners of Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize for fiction, have been writers from former colonies, including Salman Rushdie (whose 1981 Midnight's Children was also named ‘Best of the Bookers’ J. M. Coetzee (twice), Peter Carey (twice), V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri, Keri Hulme, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Keneally, J. G. Farrell, Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Arundhati Roy, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Many of these writers have also appeared several times on the shortlist, as have other postcolonial authors such as William Trevor, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rohinton Mistry, Carol Shields, Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, and André Brink.

As journalists and critics have been quick to point out, literary prizes provide welcome publicity not only for their sponsors but also for the publishers of these authors, and the Man Booker Prize is conducted in such a way as to maximize publicity and book sales through advertising the shortlisted writers and encouraging speculation and participation by readers before the televised announcement of the winner.