No longer the bridesmaid: after three shortlistings, the prolific and multifarious Margaret Atwood garnered her first Booker Prize win with The Blind Assassin.

In the lead-up to the award, the prize administrator, the mischievous Martyn Goff, said of the year’s shortlist: ‘In 30 years, there hasn’t previously been a time when I have felt unable to forecast a winner. This year any of the six could win.’

Atwood’s novel, which contained not just a book within a book but a book within a book within a book, was a deft mixture of history, love story and a meditation on the shiftiness of truth. Time magazine later named it the best novel of 2000.

By
Margaret Atwood
Published by
Bloomsbury
Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker winner is a multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality.

The Shortlist

The Blind Assassin
Prize winner
The Hiding Place
The Keepers of Truth

The 2000 judges