THE BRACKEN BOWER PRIZE

Winner announcement: Monday 5 December at 20:05 GMT

#BrackenBower

The finalists

Patients and the pursuit of profit, the pioneering work of climate tech entrepreneurs, and the parallels between Silicon Valley and the Amazon rainforest: these are the business book ideas tackled by the three finalists in this year’s Bracken Bower Prize.

This year’s finalists are:

Victoria Berquist for The Unstoppable Rise of Private Capital in Public Health: How businesses can help or harm the future of healthcare

Âriel de Fauconberg for Before the Dawn: Racing to net zero on the front lines of climate innovation

Julia Marisa Sekula for Owning the Centre: Journeys from Silicon Valley to the Amazon rainforest

ABOUT THE PRIZE

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 are 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.

Our Judges

Isabel Fernandez-Mateo

Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

London Business School

Rik Ubhi

Editorial Director

Heligo Books – Bonnier Books UK

Katherine Garrett-Cox CBE

Chief Executive Officer

GIB Asset Management

Jonathan Hillman

Author

The Digital Silk Road

Winners of the Bracken Bower Prize 2021

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'.

Failing the Class: How our education system went wrong and what to do about it

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