Robert Webb Selected to be Booker Prize Judge

Former QEGS alumni Robert Webb has been announced as one of the judges for the Booker Prize 2023.

The actor and writer was born in Lincolnshire in 1972 and attended Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Horncastle. He studied English at Cambridge, where he joined Footlights and met David Mitchell, forming the comedy partnership Mitchell and Webb. They went on to make five series of their Sony Award-winning BBC Radio 4 sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and for television, four series of the Bafta-winning That Mitchell and Webb Look for BBC2. His 2017 memoir How Not To Be a Boy entered the Sunday Times non-fiction chart at number one, was serialised in the Guardian and was abridged for Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced on 1^st August followed by the shortlisted six books on 21^st September. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on 26^th November. Joining Robert on the judging panel are novelist Esi Edugyan who will chair the panel; actor, writer and director Adjoa Andoh; poet, lecturer, editor and critic Mary Jean Chan; and James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an author specialising in Shakespeare.