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Use our search to browse hundreds of features and pages from the Booker Library of authors, books, judges, prize years and translators. You can narrow down your search using quotation marks to find an exact match.

Displaying 1981 - 1990 of 3085

1983 Booker Prize
The first win for one of the prize’s hallowed names, J.M. Coetzee, for The Life and Times of Michael K., and a domestic revelation from the chair of judges that one wouldn’t hear today.
1984 Booker Prize
Towards the end of a long career as an art historian, Anita Brookner turned to fiction and Hotel du Lac, her fourth novel, triumphed over a heavyweight Booker Prize shortlist.
1987 Booker Prize
Penelope Lively, a two-time shortlistee, finally picked up the award with Moon Tiger, a novel of subtlety and sweep that is still one of the Booker Prize’s most underrated winning novels.
1988 Booker Prize
Peter Carey’s first Booker Prize win, for Oscar and Lucinda, took the honours but Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses offered terrifying proof that literature could be truly dangerous.

1989 Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro won with Remains of the Day but only after a row in which two female judges excluded Martin Amis’s London Fields from the running for its unfeminist anti-heroine.
A.S. Byatt 1990
Possession took on new meaning when AS Byatt announced that she would spend the prize money, won with Possession, on a swimming-pool for her house in the South of France.
Ben Okri wins the 1991 Booker Prize
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.
1992 Booker Prize ceremony
The year of double winners, a rule change, and chewed Booker Prize knuckles when the judges couldn’t separate Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.
 Roddy Doyle, 1993
At the time of his win, Roddy Doyle was better known for the screen versions of his books than for the books themselves. He had already won a BAFTA for The Commitments.
1994 Booker Prize judges
Another vintage controversy when James Kelman’s win with his profanity-laden How Late It Was, How Late loosed a few profanities itself among tender-souled readers and reviewers.