Martin Amis’ inventive investigation of a war criminal, which reverses time as one man’s life races backward towards an appalling past
By Martin Amis
The Booker Prize 1991
The Booker Prize 1991
The then youngest winner in Ben Okri for The Famished Road and another episode of judging pique when Nicholas Mosley walked out in protest at the non-shortlisting of a favoured book.
Mosley, who had been on the first ever Booker Prize shortlist, was adamant that Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Fathers deserved a tilt at the prize. When his fellow judges refused to budge he promptly resigned, ‘partly in a huff,’ he said, ‘but also… to strike a blow for ideas’.
The stripling Okri, then 32, went on to triumph with a lush tale full of mysticism and spirits set in post-colonial Nigeria. Okri later said gnomically that: ‘The novel was written to give myself reasons to live.’
Watch the 1991 ceremony
The Famished Road
Winner of The Booker Prize 1991
- By
- Ben Okri
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
Ben Okri’s unique Booker Prize-winning epic, narrated by ‘an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead’
The shortlist
The hilarious third novel of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy focuses on the senior Jimmy Rabbitte and his hugely unsuccessful business venture
By Roddy Doyle
Rohinton Mistry’s first novel is set in Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh
Adolph Ng, an effete, Canadian-educated hotel owner of Chinese origin, leads a placid existence on Danu, the eastern half of an island to the north of Australia
By Timothy Mo
Ben Okri’s unique Booker Prize-winning epic, narrated by ‘an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead’
By Ben Okri
An Irish country girl marries in haste, but finds an escape from her loveless marriage in William Trevor’s haunting and evocative tale
