The Best of the Bookers
IT’S TIME to walk down memory lane and trot out all the Booker Prize winners since 1969 and see who will win The Best of the Bookers as part of the 40th-anniversary celebration of the most prestigious literary prize in 2008. The Best of the Bookers will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since its inception in 1969. Forty-one novels will be eligible for the prize as there were two winners in both 1974 and 1992. (Nadine Gordimer’s The Conversationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday in 1974, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger in 1992.) Of course, Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers in 1993 on the 25th anniversary of the prize with his magnum opus Midnight’s Children.
Here’s my shortlist of 8 novels:
1. J.M. Coetzee / Disgrace (1999)
2. Arundhati Roy / The God of Small Things (1997)
3. Michael Ondaatje / The English Patient (1992)
4. Kazuo Ishiguro / The Remains of the Day (1989)
5. Peter Carey / Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
6. Salman Rushdie / Midnight’s Children (1981)
7. Nadine Gordimer / The Conservationist (1974)
8. J.G. Farrell / The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
The Booker Prize for Fiction, 1969-2007
1. Anne Enright / The Gathering (2007)
2. Kiran Desai / The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
3. John Banville/ The Sea (2005)
4. Alan Hollinghurst / The Line of Beauty (2004)
5. D.B.C. Pierre / Vernon God Little (2002)
6. Yann Martel / Life of Pi (2001)
7. Peter Carey / True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
8. Margaret Atwood / The Blind Assassin (2000)
9. J.M. Coetzee / Disgrace (1999)
10. Ian McEwan / Amsterdam (1998)
11. Arundhati Roy / The God of Small Things (1997)
12. Graham Swift / Last Orders (1996)
13. Pat Barker / The Ghost Road (1995)
14. James Kelman / How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
15. Roddy Doyle / Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
16. Michael Ondaatje / The English Patient (1992)
17. Barry Unsworth / Sacred Hunger (1992)
18. Ben Okri / The Famished Road (1991)
19. A.S. Byatt / Possession: A Romance (1990)
20. Kazuo Ishiguro / The Remains of the Day (1989)
21. Peter Carey / Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
22. Penelope Lively / Moon Tiger (1987)
23. Kingsley Amis / The Old Devils (1986)
24. Keri Hulme / The Bone People (1983)
25. Anita Brookner / Hotel du Lac (1984)
26. J.M. Coetzee / Life and Times of Michael K (1983)
27. Thomas Keneally / Schindler’s Ark (1982)
28. Salman Rushdie / Midnight’s Children (1981)
29. William Golding / Rites of Passage (1980)
30. Penelope Fitzgerald / Offshore (1979)
31. Iris Murdoch / The Sea, the Sea (1978)
32. Paul Scott / Staying On (1977)
33. David Storey / Saville (1976)
34. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala / Heat and Dust (1975)
35. Nadine Gordimer / The Conservationist (1974)
36. Stanley Middleton / Holiday (1974)
37. J.G. Farrell / The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
38. John Berger / G. (1972)
39. V.S. Naipaul / In a Free State (1971)
40. Bernice Rubens / The Elected Member (1969)
41. Percy Howard Newby / Something to Answer For (1969)
posted by Eric Forbes at 3:27 AM
4 Comments:
for me 'true history of the kelly gang' has to be shortlisted. to make room for it i'd knock of arundhati roy or the barry unsworth (love him but didn't enjoy this book as much as his others) the rest of your list i'd go along with!
I have at least 10 books I would like to shortlist. Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang is definitely one of them. Shortlisting six books is tough; choosing one to be the best is even more difficult.
have you actually read 'em all? i've read 29 because it was hard for me to get books during much of the 80's and before that wasn't as switched on to literary fiction.
No, I have not read all the books! I was a bookseller in 1980s before going into publishing. As a bookseller I stocked a wide selection of serious fiction. I wasn't aware of the Booker Prize in the 1970s. I learnt about the Booker Prize when I started retailing books in the mid-1980s. Those were the days when many of these prize-winning novels were made into television miniseries: Heat and Dust, Brideshead Revisted, The Jewel in the Crown, etc. Many of these writers were former Booker Prize winners. That was when I started focusing on literary fiction as my choice of reading. Therefore, we tend to shortlist books from the 1980s and 1990s. I only recently got a copy of David Storey's Saville which won the Booker in 1976. I like J.G. Farrell and Paul Scott as well.
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