The shortest novel to win the Booker Prize, Penelope Fitzgerald offers a delightful glimpse into the workings of the eccentric London community living on houseboats on Battersea Reach
The Booker Prize 1979
- Winner
Penelope Fitzgerald’s win raised the perennial Booker Prize question: at what point does a novella become a novel? At 132 pages, Offshore remains the shortest winning book yet.
V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend In the River and William Golding’s Darkness Visible had been the fancied novels so victory for a slim but elegant tale of middle-class chatterers on a Battersea houseboat came as a shock. One of the judges, Hilary Spurling, later revealed that Golding had most votes but she put her foot down for Naipaul, ‘So we compromised by giving the prize to everybody’s second choice.’
Spurling also claimed that the general amazement at the result caused Fitzgerald ‘pain… and humiliation ever after’.
Offshore
Winner of The Booker Prize 1979
- Published by
- Collins
The shortest novel to win the Booker Prize, Penelope Fitzgerald offers a delightful glimpse into the workings of the eccentric London community living on houseboats on Battersea Reach
The shortlist
Thomas Keneally’s compelling historical drama about the American Civil War brings to life one of the most emotive episodes in American history
One of V.S. Naipul’s best-known works, this account of chaos and corruption in post-colonial Africa evokes echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Joseph - Julian Rathbone’s highly unreliable early 19th-century narrator - tells the story of his poignant, comic and richly entertaining life
Fay Weldon’s thought-provoking portrayal of the shifting roles and personalities of one woman as she journeys from childhood to adulthood
By Fay Weldon
The 1979 judges
Penelope Fitzgerald 1979
