What Is the Booker Prize?
The Booker Prize — officially the Man Booker Prize until 2019, now simply the Booker Prize — is the most prestigious literary award in the English-speaking world. Awarded annually since 1969 to the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom, it has crowned some of the greatest works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Unlike the Nobel Prize in Literature, which recognises a body of work, the Booker Prize focuses on a single novel, making each winner a more precise recommendation. A Booker Prize win typically multiplies a novel's sales by five to ten times — the so-called "Booker bounce" — and secures a book's place in the literary canon for at least a generation.
The Most Acclaimed Booker Winners
Not all Booker Prize winners are equal in editorial consensus. Using our aggregate scoring system, the following winners stand out as the most critically sustained across multiple decades and sources:
Midnight's Children — Salman Rushdie (1981, winner 1981)
Awarded both the Booker Prize and, in 1993, the "Booker of Bookers" — the best novel in the prize's first 25 years — and again in 2008 as the "Best of the Booker" for the prize's 40th anniversary. Rushdie's postcolonial magical realist epic, narrating Indian independence through the lives of children born at the midnight moment of partition, is the most decorated Booker winner in the prize's history. Our editorial score: 97.
The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje (1992)
Joint winner with Sacred Hunger, Ondaatje's novel of four damaged lives converging in a bomb-damaged Italian villa at the end of World War II is one of the most beautifully written novels to win the prize. It was also voted the "Best of the Booker" in 2018. The prose is lapidary and the structure brilliantly fragmented.
Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee (1999)
Coetzee is the only author to have won the Booker twice (Life and Times of Michael K in 1983, Disgrace in 1999). Disgrace, set in post-apartheid South Africa, is a novel of reckoning — with guilt, complicity, and the impossibility of redemption. It is also among the most contested Booker winners, which is part of what makes it significant.
Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel (2009)
Mantel's reinvention of the historical novel — narrated in the present tense, from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell — won the Booker in 2009 and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, won it again in 2012. No author has won the Booker twice in three years. The Wolf Hall trilogy (completed with The Mirror and the Light in 2020) is the defining English historical fiction of the twenty-first century.
Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders (2017)
The most formally experimental winner of the modern era: a polyphonic novel set in the bardo (Tibetan Buddhist liminal state between death and rebirth) inhabited by ghosts who cannot accept their deaths, centred on Abraham Lincoln's grief over his son Willie. One of the most formally innovative novels to win the prize.
Booker Winners by Decade
1969–1979: Foundation Years
The prize launched with P.H. Newby's Something to Answer For (1969). Early winners including V.S. Naipaul (In a Free State, 1971) and Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist, 1974) established the prize's interest in postcolonial and global English-language fiction.
1980–1989: The High Canon
The 1980s produced some of the prize's most lasting winners: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (1982), J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (1983), Keri Hulme's The Bone People (1985), and Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (1988).
1990–1999: Global Reach
A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989, just outside the decade), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997), and Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (1998) — a controversial choice — defined the 1990s.
2000–2009: The Expansion
Peter Carey won his second Booker with True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2002), DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little (2003), Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), John Banville's The Sea (2005), and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) marked the decade.
2010–2019: New Voices
Eleanor Catton became the youngest Booker winner with The Luminaries (2013). Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015) brought Jamaican literature its first win. Paul Beatty was the first American to win after the prize opened to all English-language fiction in 2014, with The Sellout (2016).
2020–2025: Recent Champions
Douglas Stuart's debut Shuggie Bain (2020), Damon Galgut's The Promise (2021), and Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) have continued the prize's tradition of rewarding formally ambitious, politically engaged fiction from across the English-speaking world.
Which Booker Winner Should You Read First?
For newcomers: start with The God of Small Things, Life of Pi, or The Remains of the Day — all are highly accessible while demonstrating the prize's ambition. For readers who want a challenge: Midnight's Children or Wolf Hall. For something contemporary: Shuggie Bain or The Promise.