Brought to you by the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company, we aim to unearth new talent by encouraging young authors, under the age of 35, to tackle emerging business themes. Previous winners and finalists have gone on to secure book deals with leading publishers.

Your proposal should take the form of an essay or article of no more than 5,000 words that conveys the argument, scope and style of a proposed full-length business book and includes a description of the structure of the proposed work. The judges are looking for evidence of knowledge, creativity, originality, and style. Most important, they are on the lookout for proposals for books that promise to break new ground, or examine pressing business challenges in original ways.

Please register your interest below to be kept updated on the Bracken Bower Prize. You will receive additional useful information that will help you with your entry plus details of how to submit your entry.

The Bracken Bower Prize is named after Brendan Bracken, Chairman of the  FT from 1945 to 1958, and Marvin Bower, Managing Director of McKinsey & Company from 1950 to 1967, who were instrumental in laying the foundation for the present day success of the two institutions. The prize aims to encourage young writers and researchers to identify and analyse the business trends of the future.

The annual prize will be awarded to the best proposal. The judges will favour authors who write with knowledge, creativity, originality and style and whose proposed books promise to break new ground, or examine pressing business challenges in original ways. 

Only writers who are over 18 and under 35 on 30 November 2022 will be eligible. They can be a published author, but the proposal itself must be original and must not have been previously submitted to a publisher.

 The Bracken Bower Prize will be presented at the Business Book of the Year Award event on 5 December 2022.

From the many excellent entries received last year the judges chose 14 book proposals for the 2021 shortlist. It was a hard fought competition this year with 3 outstanding finalists. The winners of the 2021 Bracken Bower Prize were Ines Lee & Eileen Tipoes for their book proposal entitled 'Failing the Class'. 

By Ines Lee and Eileen Tipoe   

Dear 18-year-old me, Three years from now, you will graduate from your dream university — congratulations! Last week, you arrived on campus with common preconceptions about what a university education is all about: specialising in a particular subject, establishing a personal and professional network, learning how to get a good job in a good company. In many ways, you will end up getting everything that you expected from a quality education: expertise in a field, a solid group of friends, mentors whom you can reach out to, and a job with a comfortable salary. Yet, the closer you get to leaving the comfortable bubble of your campus environment, the more you will discover what education is about. Yesterday, you turned up to your first class eager to learn, but this excitement will wane as learning becomes more of a box-ticking exercise to get good grades rather than a continuous process of discovery. The more you learn, the more difficult it will be to see the world from a perspective other than your own. Strangely, you will become too good at arguing for views you already believe in, and too dismissive of views you disagree with. To your disappointment, your bachelors degree will drive a wedge between you and your childhood friends who didn’t go to university. Like the “educated” and “uneducated” across the nation, you will support opposite sides of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. You will see that inequality is embedded in almost every step of the education system — from who gets admitted to the good universities to who graduates with a first-class degree — which will make you question the promise of social mobility via education. In some ways, you will see the end of your university years as the start of an education. I hope that you will take these next few years as an opportunity to construct your own views about the world and question the common notions of what an education is all about. Yours sincerely, Your graduating self

To read more of Ines and Eileen's proposal, as well as excerpts from the proposals of last year's other finalists, click the link below

The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck

by Dr Christian Bush

2017 Winner

Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet – and What To Do About It

by Michelle Meagher

2018 Shortlist

The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck

by Dr Christian Bush

2017 Winner

Out-Innovate:  How Global Entrepreneurs--from Delhi to Detroit--Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley

by Alexandre Lazarow 

2017 Finalist 

Blockchain Babel: The Crypto Craze and the Challenge to Business

by Igor Pejic

2016 Finalist

The Fuzzy and the Techie

by Scott Hartley 

2016 Finalist

Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It

by Christopher Clearfield & András Tilcsik

2015 Winners

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa

by Irene Yuan Sun

2015 Finalist

The Power of Being Divisive: Understanding Negative Social Evaluations

by Thomas J. Roulet

2015 Finalist

The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World

by David Skarbek

2015 Shortlist

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