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Year
The Booker Prize 1969
The first year of the Booker Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the food wholesalers Booker McConnell Ltd and with a £5,000 cheque for the winner. No one knew quite what to expect.
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- Type
Year
The Booker Prize 1971
The start of a noble tradition of Booker Prize rumpuses when one judge, Malcolm Muggeridge, denounced ‘most of the entries’ as ‘mere pornography’ and withdrew his services.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1972
Proof of the prize’s new high profile came when John Berger used his platform as winner to make things political and donated half his prize money to the British Black Panther movement
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Year
The Booker Prize 1973
JG Farrell followed John Berger’s attack on the sponsors by launching one of his own, using his winner’s speech to criticise Booker McConnell’s involvement in Third World agriculture.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1974
The Booker Prize’s bugbear – the double win – raised its head for the first time when the award was split between Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1975
Another year of controversy when after working their way through the 83 novels submitted the unimpressed judges decided that only two of them were worthy of shortlisting.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1977
The chair of judges, Philip Larkin, threatened to jump out of a window if Paul Scott’s Staying On didn’t win. Luckily for literary history, Scott’s book triumphed and Larkin lived on.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1978
A pipped shortlistee in three of the first five Booker Prizes, this was finally Iris Murdoch’s year. Surprise was lacking, however, when the winner’s name was leaked before the big reveal.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1979
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.
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Year
The Booker Prize 1980
William Golding’s win was shaded by Anthony Burgess stating that he wouldn’t attend the ceremony unless he knew in advance that he had won. The judges refused to be swayed.