The Man Booker Prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.

2009 Winner Oct 8

Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate - Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes ThomasCromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. More

2009 Other Shortlisted

Award Tragic Commentary

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Byatt, AS, The Children's Book, Random House - Chatto and Windus -ISBN: 9780701183899 - Olive Wellwood is a famous writer. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their cousins, children of a city stockbroker, are already inscribed with mystery. More

Coetzee, J M, Summertime, Random House ISBN: 9781846553189 - Harvill Secker - A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. More

Foulds, Adam, The Quickening Maze, Random House - Jonathan Cape - ISBN: 9780224087469 - Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, "The Quickening Maze" centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare,more

Waters, Sarah, The Little Stranger, Little, Brown - Virago -ISBN: 9781844086023 - After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote THE NIGHT WATCH, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. More

Mawer, Simon, The Glass Room, Little, Brown -Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure - these are things that happen in the Glass Room. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. More

2009 Other Longlisted

Hall, Sarah, How to paint a dead man, Faber and Faber -ISBN: 9780571224890- Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. More

Harvey, Samantha, The Wilderness, Random House - Jonathan Cape - It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? More

Lever, James, Me Cheeta, HarperCollins - Fourth Estate -ISBN: 9780007280162 - The incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood. The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. Maureen O'Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller's son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film 'Tarzan Finds a Mate', has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs as an abstract painter. At the incredible age of seventy-six, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded. More

O'Loughlin, Ed, Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Penguin - Ireland - In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved! "Not Untrue and Not Unkind" is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form. More

Scudamore, James, Heliopolis, Random House - ISBN: 9781846551888 - Harvill Secker - Born in a Sao Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation. Directed by forces beyond his control, he first leaves, then returns to the vast city of his birth - but on the opposite side of its social divide. Now twenty-seven, he works for a vacuous 'communications company', marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has an appetite that can never be satisfied. More

Toibin, Colm, Brooklyn, Penguin -ISBN: 9780670918126- Viking In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. More

Trevor, William, Love and Summer, Penguin - Viking -ISBN: 9780670918249 - It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys were said to own half the town; and, in any case, he had come to Rathmoye only to see the scorched remains of the cinema. But Mrs Connulty's daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it's she who comes to witness the events that follow. More

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga Wins 2008 Booker

London 14th October The White Tiger, a debut novel by Aravind Adiga (right) has on the2008 Man Booker prize and with it the £50,000 prize. The novel is described as a ‘compelling, angry and darkly humorous’ novel about a man’s journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success. It was described by one reviewer as an ‘unadorned portrait’ of India seen ‘from the bottom of the heap’.

The judging panel for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comprised: Michael Portillo, former MP and Cabinet Minister; Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar’s bookshops; and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.

Michael Portillo commented:

“The judges found the decision difficult because the shortlist contained such strong candidates. In the end, The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure.

“The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader’s sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humor.”

Portillo went on to explain that the novel had won overall because of ‘its originality’. He said that The White Tiger presented ‘a different aspect of India’ and was a novel with ‘enormous literary merit’.

The Man Booker Prize 2008 shortlisted novels:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger (Atlantic) - Winner

Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi behind the wheel of a Honda. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls, and the crippling traffic jams, Balram learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. Driven by desire to better himself, he comes to see how the Tiger might escape his cage... More

Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval... More

Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray)

A stunningly vibrant novel from Amitav Ghosh, author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller THE GLASS PALACE At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage... More

Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)

The brilliant new novel by Orange Prize winner, Linda Grant, about the legacies of history, longlisted for both the Orange Prize, 2008 and the Man Booker Prize, 2008 In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive... More

Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)

'Lovingly rooted in 1970s and 1980s Sheffield, "The Northern Clemency" effectively reclaimed a lost genre of politically astute, richly decorated provincial family saga for modern readers.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent (Book of the Year) 'A tremendous book. Against an unfashionable 1970s background Philip Hensher has composed not so much a condition-of-England as a condition-of-humanity novel, which is gripping and surprising and shocking in all kinds of unpredictable ways, and enormously wide in psychological and moral scope. What a writer he is!' Philip Pullman 'Wise and strong and unputdownable.' A.S. Byatt, Financial Times (Book of the Year) Alex Clark, Sunday Telegraph (Book of the Year) More

Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

A story of families and how to survive them. It incorporates death, parenting, one labyrinth,first love, a handbook for criminals, a scheme to make everyone rich and a suggestion box. From his prison cell, Jasper Dean tells the unlikely story of... More

2008 Booker Other Longlisted
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress

Alfred Gibson's funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives... More

John Berger From A to X

In From A to X: A Story in Letters, internationally-acclaimed author John Berger conjures an epistolary romance between an insurgent named Xavier and his beloved A'ida. With every letter, a larger sense of their world emerges: Xavier's... More

Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog

A mystery and a love story, an exploration of art and nature, a meditation on ageing and the passage oftime. It offers a contemporary novel which examines the weight of history as well as different ways of trying to grasp the world. More

Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: mechanical failure, human error, the CIA's impatience, a blind woman's curse or Generals... More

Joseph O'Neill Netherland

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his... More

Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence

A young European traveler calling himself 'Mogor dell 'Amora', the Mughal of Love arrives at thecourt of Emperor Akbar. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar, Qara Koz... More

Tom Rob Smith Child 44

In Soviet Russia, Leo Demidov is after a killer that the State denies exists. But he's in dangerhimself - from the country he's trying to protect In Stalin's Soviet Union, crime does not exist. But still millions live in fear. The mere suspicion... More

Booker Winners and Shortlists 1969- 2007

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999

Winner 2007: Anne Enright, The Gathering

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brotherLiam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. More

o Nicola Barker, Darkmans

From the award-winning author of 'Clear 'comes an epic novel of startling originality. If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself... More

o Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

In the wake of September 11, Changez, a Pakistani man in Manhattan, finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. Changez's own identity is in... More

o Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

A book can change your life forever... 'You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will... More

o Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

In a hotel overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come. This book presents the story... More

o Indra Sinha, Animal's People

An Indian Cyrano de Bergerac, about the relationship between an extraordinary street boy and the enemy who came to help. Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when... More

Links below here go to Blackwell Books

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 2006: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

In foothills of Himalayas sits a house - home to three people and a dog. There is retired judge dreaming of colonial yesterdays; his orphaned granddaughter Sai who has fallen for her tutor; the cook, whose son writes untruthful letters... More

o Kate Grenville, The Secret River

William Thornhill is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes amistake, for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. More

o M. J. Hyland, Carry Me Down

Ireland, 1971, John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giantwho insists on the ridiculous truth'. With an obsession for the "Guinness Book of Records" and faith in his ability to detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the unfortunate cards life deals him. More

o Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

On a white-hot day in Tripoli, Libya, in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in themarket square with his mother. His father is away on business - but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street. More

o Edward St Aubyn, Mother's Milk

The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife consumed by motherhood, his mother consumed by a New Age foundation... More

o Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

Sarah Waters, the award-winning author of three novels set in Victorian London, returns witha stunning novel that marks a departure from the 19th century. Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons... More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 2005: John Banville, The Sea

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent achildhoodholiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace twins, Myles and Chloe, fascinated Max. He grew to know them... More

o Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

A novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race; about what we think, what we believe, and what we know. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain... More

o Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Willie Dunne finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. More

o Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. This is the story of love, friendship and memory, with a sense of thefragility of life. More

o Ali Smith, The Accidental

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. More

o Zadie Smith , On Beauty

Set in New England mainly and London partly, this work concerns a pair of feuding families -the Belseys and the Kipps, and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some questions about what life does to love. More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 2004: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children... More

o Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit

The last time Silas Ali encountered the Lieutenant, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Lydia, his wife. When Silas sees him again, by chance, crimes from the past erupt into the... More

o Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

Opening on the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, on the remote north-west coast of England, The Electric Michelangelo is a novel of love, loss and the art of tattooing. Hugely atmospheric, exotic and familiar, it is an exquisitely rendered...More

o David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity'sdangerous will to power, and where it may lead us. 'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies ...' A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850... More

o Colm Tóibín, The Master

It is January 1895 and Henry James's play, Guy Domville, from which he hoped to make his fortune, hasfailed on the London stage. Opening with this disaster, The Master spans the next five years of James's life, during which time he moves to Rye... More

o Gerard Woodward, I'll Go to Bed at Noon

It is 1970 in the suburbs of north London and, from the untidy comfort of her crowded house, Colette Jonesis watching her older brother go to pieces, drinking himself into oblivion on home-made wine. Colette knows the solace a drink can provide. More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 2003: DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little

Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre of16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks... More

o Monica Ali, Brick Lane

After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder Nazneen exchanges her Bangladeshi villagehome for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make... More

o Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize Pigs might not fly but they arestrangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself... More

o Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor

Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting full of optimism. Frank, the disgruntled deputy, is forced to share his room with the new arrival but is determined to stay out of Laurence's ambitious schemes. Laurence Waters arrives at his... More

o Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal

When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from therest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an... More

o Clare Morrall, Astonishing Splashes of Colour

Caught in an over-vivid world because of her synaesthesia (feelings are experienced as colors), Kitty feelshaunted by her "child that never was." As children all around become emblems of hope, longing, and grief, she begins to understand the... More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 2002: Yann Martel, Life of Pi

One boy, one boat, one tiger... After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboatremains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg)... More

o Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters

Nariman Vakeel, a 79-year-old Parsi widower, beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories ofthe past, lives in a once-elegant apartment with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When his condition worsens he is forced to take up residence... More

o Carol Shields, Unless

All her life Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness with a loving family and growingsuccess as a writer. Then her eldest daughter suddenly withdraws from the world to sit on a street corner, uncommunicative but for a sign... More

o William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in thebig house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house... More

o Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

"We could pass anything, anything at all, at speeds which would astonish you". Sue, orphaned at birth, is born among petty thieves - fingersmiths - in London's Borough. From the moment she draws breath, her fate is linked to another orphan... More

o Tim Winton, Dirt Music

Georgie Jutland has lost her way. Living with a fisherman she doesn't love, feeling alienated from her neighbours, she spends her nights in a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Until one morning, in the pre-dawn gloom... More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to to

Winner 2001: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

This story is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in a voice at once crude and delicate, menacing and heart-wrenching. The author gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, as Oedipus, as horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber... More

o Ian McEwan, Atonement

A story that begins with three young people in the garden of a country house on the hottestday of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives. A depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and forgiveness... More

o Andrew Miller, Oxygen

In the summer of 1997, four people reach a turning point: Alice Valentine, her two sons, and Laszlo Lazar. For each, the time has come to assess what matters in life, and all will be forced to take part in an act of liberation - not necessarily... More

oDavid Mitchell, number9dream

As Eiji Miyake's twentieth birthday nears, he sets out for the seething metropolis of Tokyo tofind the father he has never met. There, he begins a thrilling, whirlwind journey where dreams, memories and reality collide then diverge as Eiji is... More

o Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room

"The Dark Room" tells three stories: that of Helmut a young photographer in the 1930s; Lore a 12-year-old girl at the end of the war; and Micha, a young school teacher, half a century later. Between them, the reader traces the legacy of the Nazi... More

o Ali Smith, Hotel World

Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. This book introduces five characters and traces their intersecting lives. Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 2000: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent Industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her... More

o Trezza Azzopardi, The Hiding Place

Set in the Maltese community of Tiger Bay, and peopled with sharp-edged, luminously drawn characters, this book is the story of Frank Gauci, his wife Mary, and their six daughters. It shows the underworld of 1960's Cardiff as seen through the eyes... More

o Michael Collins, The Keepers of Truth

It is the mid-80s in post-industrial America. In a small town graced with the decaying hulks of defunctfactories, young journalist and college dropout Bill churns out lengthy essays on the death of industry and of America itself for The Daily... More

o Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai... More

o Matthew Kneale, English Passengers

Presents a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in Tasmania. 'A big, ambitious novel with a rich historical sweep and a host of narrative voices. Its subject is a vicar's ludicrous expedition in 1857 to the Garden of Eden in... More

o Brian O'Doherty, The Deposition of Father McGreevey

An exploration of the locus of misfortune and the nature of evil, set in an isolated village in which all the women mysteriously die. In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a mention of the strange - and reputedly... More

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winners 1967 - 1990

Winner 1999: J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
o Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting
o Michael Frayn, Headlong
o Andrew O'Hagan, Our Fathers
o Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love
o Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship

Winner 1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
o Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie
o Julian Barnes, England, England
o Martin Booth, The Industry of Souls
o Patrick McCabe, Breakfast on Pluto
o Magnus Mills, The Restraint of Beasts

Winner 1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
o Jim Crace, Quarantine
o Mick Jackson, The Underground Man
o Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes
o Tim Parks, Europa
o Madeleine St John, The Essence of the Thing

Winner 1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders
o Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
o Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man for Himself
o Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark
o Shena Mackay, The Orchard on Fire
o Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Winner 1995: Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
o Justin Cartwright, In Every Face I Meet
o Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
o Barry Unsworth, Morality Play
o Tim Winton, The Riders

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 1994: James Kelman, How late it was, how late
o Romesh Gunesekera, Reef
o Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise
o Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star
o George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time
o Jill Paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels

Winner 1993: Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
o Tibor Fischer, Under the Frog
o Michael Ignatieff, Scar Tissue
o David Malouf, Remembering Babylon
o Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River
o Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Winner 1992: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
o Christopher Hope, Serenity House
o Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy
o Ian McEwan, Black Dogs
o Michèle Roberts, Daughters of the House

Winner 1991: Ben Okri , The Famished Road
o Martin Amis, Time's Arrow
o Roddy Doyle, The Van
o Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey
o Timothy Mo, The Redundancy of Courage
o William Trevor, Reading Turgenev (from Two Lives)

Winner 1990: A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance
o Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure
o Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels
o John McGahern, Amongst Women
o Brian Moore, Lies of Silence
o Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here

Winner 1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
o Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
o John Banville, The Book of Evidence
o Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw
o James Kelman, A Disaffection
o Rose Tremain, Restoration

Winner 1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
o Bruce Chatwin, Utz
o Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring
o David Lodge, Nice Work
o Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
o Marina Warner, The Lost Father

Winner 1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
o Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
o Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton
o Nina Bawden, Circles of Deceit
o Brian Moore, The Colour of Blood
o Iris Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 1986: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
o Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
o Paul Bailey, Gabriel's Lament
o Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone
o Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
o Timothy Mo, An Insular Possession

Winner 1985: Keri Hulme, The Bone People
o Peter Carey, Illywhacker
o J. L. Carr, The Battle of Pollocks Crossing
o Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist
o Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav
o Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice

Winner 1984: Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
o J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
o Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
o Anita Desai, In Custody
o Penelope Lively, According to Mark
o David Lodge, Small World

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 1983: J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K
o Malcolm Bradbury, Rates of Exchange
o John Fuller, Flying to Nowhere
o Anita Mason, The Illusionist
o Salman Rushdie, Shame
o Graham Swift, Waterland

Winner 1982: Thomas Keneally (right), Schindler's Ark
o John Arden, Silence Among the Weapons (also published as Vox Pop: Last Days of the Roman

Republic)
o William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War
o Lawrence Durrell, Constance or Solitary
o Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom
o Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet*

Winner 1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
o Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
o Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments
o Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers
o Ann Schlee, Rhine Journey
o Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
o D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel

Winner 1980: William Golding, Rites of Passage
o Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
o Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
o Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid
o Julia O'Faolain, No Country for Young Men
o Barry Unsworth, Pascali's Island
o J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

Winner 1979: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
o Thomas Keneally, Confederates
o V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
o Julian Rathbone, Joseph
o Fay Weldon, Praxis

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 1978: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
o Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing
o André Brink, Rumours of Rain
o Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
o Jane Gardam, God on the Rocks
o Bernice Rubens, A Five-Year Sentence

Winner 1977: Paul Scott, Staying On
o Paul Bailey, Peter Smart's Confessions
o Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster
o Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on our Skin
o Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield
o Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

Winner 1976: David Storey, Saville
o André Brink, An Instant in the Wind
o R. C. Hutchinson, Rising
o Brian Moore, The Doctor's Wife
o Julian Rathbone, King Fisher Lives
o William Trevor, The Children of Dynmouth

Winner 1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
o Thomas Keneally, Gossip from the Forest

Winner 1974: Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, and Stanley Middleton, Holiday
o Kingsley Amis, Ending Up
o Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing
o C. P. Snow, In Their Wisdom

Winner 1973: James Gordon Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur
o Beryl Bainbridge, The Dressmaker
o Elizabeth Mavor, The Green Equinox
o Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

Winner 1972: John Berger, G.
o Susan Hill, The Bird of Night
o Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
o David Storey, Pasmore

Winner 1971: V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State
o Thomas Kilroy, The Big Chapel
o Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell
o Mordecai Richler, St Urbain's Horseman
o Derek Robinson, Goshawk Squadron
o Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Winner 1970: Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member
o A. L. Barker, John Brown's Body
o Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout
o Iris Murdoch, Bruno's Dream
o William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel
o T. W. Wheeler, The Conjunction

2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 |2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1969 -1999 | back to top

Winner 1969: Percy Howard Newby, Something to Answer For
o Barry England, Figures in a Landscape
o Nicholas Mosley, Impossible Object
o Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
o Muriel Spark, The Public Image
o G. M. Williams, From Scenes like These