Award Winners

Best Booker Prize Winners — 12 Essential Novels From the Prize's History

The Booker Prize (known as the Man Booker Prize 2002–2019) has been awarded annually since 1969 to the best original novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. It has made reputations (Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro), rescued books from obscurity, and occasionally baffled everyone. Its record is not perfect — Iris Murdoch won once; Philip Roth and William Trevor never did — but the list of winners contains more essential novels than almost any other prize. These twelve are where to begin.

Awarded since 1969

Literary fiction's most prestigious prize

12 essential winners

The Booker Prize: What to Know

The Booker has historically favoured British and Irish authors, with postcolonial literature a recurring strength — Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy, and Marlon James all won. Since 2014 the prize has been open to any novel written in English, which has led to American winners (Paul Beatty, George Saunders, Douglas Stuart) and some controversy.
Kazuo Ishiguro has won once (The Remains of the Day, 1989) and been shortlisted multiple times. Hilary Mantel is the only author to have won twice for consecutive novels in a trilogy. Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee have each won twice.
The Booker has a record of championing difficult, formally ambitious fiction. Wolf Hall, Lincoln in the Bardo, and A Brief History of Seven Killings are not easy reads — but the difficulty is earned. If you want a reliable difficulty gauge: anything pre-2000 tends toward challenge; recent winners have been more accessible.
The prize that wasn't: the Booker's most famous non-winner is Graham Greene, who was repeatedly overlooked. Philip Roth, who won the International Booker, was considered but never shortlisted for the main prize. The "Booker that got away" — novels shortlisted but defeated by a lesser winner — is a parlour game for literary readers.

The Unmissable Classics

Pick #1

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 1981 · Winner

Booker of Bookers Magical realism India's independence

Saleem Sinai is born at midnight on August 15, 1947 — the exact moment of India's independence — and discovers he is telepathically linked to every child born in that hour. Rushdie's debut is an act of literary ambition that reshaped what the English novel could do: magic realism as historical method, India's postcolonial story told as personal myth. It won the Booker in 1981 and was later voted the "Booker of Bookers" — the best Booker winner of the prize's first 25 years. Dense, funny, sometimes infuriating, and genuinely great.

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Pick #2

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989 · Winner

Unreliable narrator English repression Regret

Stevens, a butler at a great English house, takes a motoring holiday through the English countryside and slowly, reluctantly, confronts the fact that he has wasted his life in devoted service to a man who was a Nazi sympathiser, and in suppressing every emotion including love. Ishiguro's novel works almost entirely through what is not said — the gaps and evasions in Stevens's narration are the novel's real content. One of the great studies of self-deception in English fiction, and one of the most quietly devastating novels in the language.

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Pick #3

Schindler's Ark

Thomas Keneally · 1982 · Winner

Holocaust Documentary novel Oskar Schindler

Thomas Keneally's meticulously researched documentary novel about Oskar Schindler — the Nazi Party member and opportunist who saved over a thousand Jewish lives in occupied Poland — won the Booker in 1982 and was later adapted by Spielberg as Schindler's List. The novel is more complex than the film: Schindler's motivations remain ambiguous throughout, his character a mix of greed, vanity, and something that becomes, against his own expectations, genuine heroism. The Krakow ghetto and the Plaszow camp are rendered with a specificity that honours the historical record.

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Pick #4

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 1992 · Winner (joint)

WWII Italy Lyrical prose Shared winner

Ondaatje's novel of a burned man dying in an Italian villa at the end of WWII, tended by a Canadian nurse and a Sikh sapper, is among the most beautiful prose works in the Booker's history. It shared the prize in 1992 with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger — a rare joint award — and spawned the Booker debate about whether beautiful prose or narrative structure should take precedence. Ondaatje prioritises the sentence above all else; every paragraph rewards re-reading. The desert explorer plot and the North African campaign give the novel its historical weight; the love story gives it its grief.

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Modern Winners (2000–2015)

Pick #5

Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee · 1999 · Winner

Post-apartheid South Africa Sexual transgression Coetzee's finest

A Cape Town professor loses his position after an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter's remote farm, where a violent assault leaves both of them changed. Coetzee's most controversial novel — the South African government objected to its portrayal of the country — is also his most rigorously honest. The question it poses: what does it mean for a white man to "learn his disgrace" in post-apartheid South Africa? There are no comfortable answers and Coetzee does not offer any. Coetzee won the Booker twice (also for Life and Times of Michael K in 1983) and the Nobel Prize in 2003.

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Pick #6

Atonement

Ian McEwan · 2001 · Shortlisted (did not win)

Shortlisted Narrative self-consciousness Dunkirk

Atonement did not win the Booker (it was pipped by Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang) but is widely considered the better novel and one of the most important British novels of the century. A thirteen-year-old girl misinterprets what she sees through a window and an accusation ruins two lives. The novel's formal trick — a revelation in the final section that reframes everything that came before — is among the most daring things McEwan has attempted. The Dunkirk section is among the finest prose sequences in recent British fiction.

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Pick #7

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 2009 · Winner

Tudor England Thomas Cromwell Two Booker wins

The first of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, following Henry VIII's fixer from his origins as a blacksmith's son to his rise to the king's right hand. Mantel won the Booker with Wolf Hall (2009) and again with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) — the only author to win the prize twice for novels in a sequence. The trilogy was completed posthumously with The Mirror and the Light (2020), shortlisted but not a winner. Wolf Hall's formal innovation — using "he" to refer to Cromwell throughout — creates an unusual intimacy with a man who has been history's villain. The best historical novel of the century.

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Pick #8

The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton · 2013 · Winner

Astrological structure New Zealand Gold Rush 832 pages

Set during the New Zealand Gold Rush of the 1860s, with a structure based on the movements of the celestial bodies (each section half the length of the previous), The Luminaries is the most formally ambitious Booker winner since Midnight's Children. Catton was 28 when it won — the youngest ever Booker laureate. At 832 pages it is also one of the longest winners. The mystery at its centre (a missing man, a dead woman, a chest of gold) is genuinely gripping; the structural conceit rewards readers who track the astrological references alongside the plot.

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Recent Winners (2016–present)

Pick #9

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James · 2015 · Winner

Jamaica Bob Marley Polyphonic

Loosely based on the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley (referred to throughout as "the Singer"), this 686-page novel tells Jamaica's story from the 1970s through the 1990s through a chorus of voices — gunmen, CIA operatives, drug dealers, a Rolling Stone journalist, ghosts. Marlon James is the first Jamaican author to win the Booker. The novel is violent, formally daring, written in multiple Jamaican dialects that require acclimatisation, and entirely unlike anything that had won the prize before. The title is ironic: this is not a brief history of anything.

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Pick #10

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders · 2017 · Winner

Abraham Lincoln Ghosts Experimental form

Abraham Lincoln visits the Washington cemetery where his eleven-year-old son Willie has just been buried. He is not alone: the graveyard is populated by ghosts — the "bardo" of the Tibetan Buddhist concept, a transitional state between death and rebirth — who narrate their own stories alongside Lincoln's grief. Saunders's first novel after years of celebrated short stories uses a chorus structure built from quasi-historical documents (some real, some invented) and ghost narrators. It won the Booker in 2017 and demonstrated that formally experimental fiction about grief can also be warmly funny.

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Pick #11

Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart · 2020 · Winner

Glasgow, 1980s Addiction Mother and son

Shuggie Bain grows up in 1980s Glasgow loving his alcoholic mother Agnes with a devotion that no child should need to give and no parent should require. Stuart's autobiographical first novel — rejected by over thirty publishers before winning the Booker — captures the working-class Glasgow of Thatcher's deindustrialisation with a precision that is both documentary and lyrical. The relationship between Shuggie and Agnes is the most devastating portrait of unconditional love in recent fiction. Stuart is one of the most important new voices in British literature.

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Pick #12

The Sea

John Banville · 2005 · Winner

Irish Memory and grief Prose mastery

A recently widowed art historian returns to the Irish seaside town where he spent his childhood holidays, and the present grief of losing his wife becomes entangled with the memory of a family he knew as a boy — and a loss he has carried since. Banville's prose is among the most controlled in English: every sentence is constructed with the care of a jeweller. The Booker judges in 2005 were criticised for choosing Banville over Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) and Ian McEwan (Saturday) — two novels with wider readerships. The criticism misses what The Sea actually does: it is the prize choosing difficulty and exactness over accessibility, which is the Booker at its best.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize?

The Booker Prize (this page) is for novels originally written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The International Booker Prize (established as the Man Booker International Prize in 2005, relaunched in its current form in 2016) is for works of fiction translated into English, and the prize is split between author and translator. Recent International Booker winners include Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, David Grossman's A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Han Kang's The Vegetarian. The two prizes are entirely separate. This page covers only the main Booker.

Which Booker winner should I read first if I'm new to literary fiction?

The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) is the most accessible starting point: short (245 pages), psychologically absorbing, and formally innovative without being difficult. The prose is crisp. The emotional impact is significant. Shuggie Bain is the other easy recommendation for new readers — it reads more like a conventional novel (strong characters, clear emotional stakes, linear-ish timeline) while being genuinely literary. Midnight's Children and A Brief History of Seven Killings are both rewarding but require patience and acclimatisation; save them for when you have more experience with literary fiction.

What are the most famous Booker controversies?

Several. In 1994 James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late — written largely in Glaswegian dialect, with several thousand uses of the word "fuck" — won over heavy favourite Graham Swift's Last Orders; a judge resigned in protest. In 2011 Julian Barnes finally won (The Sense of an Ending) after three previous shortlistings and the prize being nicknamed "the Barnes Prize" for novels that weren't his. In 2019 Margaret Atwood (The Testaments) and Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) shared the prize in breach of the rules, which require a single winner; the judges defied the Booker Foundation. The 2005 award to Banville over Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) and McEwan (Saturday) remains disputed.

Which Booker Prize winners are most accessible for general readers?

The most consistently accessible Booker winners include: The Kite Runner (not actually a winner — common misconception), Life of Pi (2002, Yann Martel — an adventure story with philosophical depth), The White Tiger (2008, Aravind Adiga — a dark but propulsive thriller), The Finkler Question (2010, Howard Jacobson — a comedy about Jewish identity), and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (shortlisted, not a winner — another common misconception). Of actual winners on this list: Shuggie Bain, The Remains of the Day, and Lincoln in the Bardo are the three most page-turning despite their literary ambitions.