10 of the best memoirs by Booker Prize-winning authors

Every novelist leaves a trace of themselves on every page, but not all are willing to share the true story of their lives. In fact, of the 55 writers who have won the Booker Prize, only a small number have written an autobiography. Some have played with the idea, such as 1975 winner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose 2004 book My Nine Lives is a ‘potentially autobiographical’ account of ‘nine possible lives’ she might have lived. 

As double Booker winner Margaret Atwood publishes her own long-awaited memoir, Book of Lives, we cast an eye over 10 Booker winners who have published their life story – in one form or another – and what we learned about them. 

A Stinging Delight by David Storey 

Storey, who won the Booker Prize in 1976 for Saville, was born in the same year as Penelope Lively – 1933 – but his upbringing in the north of England, and the memoir that came out of it, could not be more different. Storey wrote his memoir in the 1990s but shied away from publishing it; it only appeared in 2021, four years after his death. 

Immediately we can see why. This is an exceptional memoir: stark – even bleak – and entirely unsparing in its account of Storey’s suffering throughout his life. It opens with a powerful address to Storey’s older brother, Neville, who died as a child while Storey was in his mother’s womb. His mother, traumatised, was unable to love her new son, and Storey attributes to this the sense of mental distress which never left him through his life. This is exemplified in a shocking account of almost throwing himself in front of a London Underground train, and periods in psychiatric hospitals in later life due to mental ill health. The whole book is addressed to Neville, which gives it an intimacy but also a distant quality, though the opacity of Storey’s feelings is not surprising for an author whose books were full of loss and had closed titles like Saville, Pasmore (shortlisted, 1972) and Radcliffe. 

But there is energy here, too, driven by Storey’s many lives. He was an artist, a playwright and a poet, as well as a novelist who began his first book on the toilet at home: the only place he could find quiet. (‘How long are you going to be in there?’) On top of this he was a teacher – there’s a scene of visceral violence when he punches two pupils who try to attack him in a gang – and a professional rugby player: his £400 signing fee was ‘the largest single sum of money anyone in our family had ever seen’. Storey brings his novelist’s skills to snappy scenes of his professional dealings with actors and filmmakers. But the tenderest moment in this tough book is addressed to Neville, again, when Storey reflects that as a writer in London, ‘I would come as close as I could to the David I might have been had your death not occurred: untortured, accessible, eager to begin’. 

Memoirs by Kingsley Amis 

For pure entertainment value, Amis’s memoirs – published in 1991, five years after he won the Booker Prize with The Old Devils – are hard to beat. He makes it clear that this will not be a sequential account of his life. ‘I have already written an account of myself in twenty or more volumes, most of them called novels.’ He despatches his main life events in two paragraphs at the end of his preface. Instead, this is a selection of anecdotes and revelations about the people he met during his career. 

Highlights include meeting Roald Dahl, who advised Amis there was good money in children’s fiction. When Amis said he had ‘no feeling for that kind of thing’, Dahl replied, ‘Never mind, the little bastards swallow it’. There are nuggets for Booker followers, too. Judge Philip Toynbee, having dinner at the home of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett in order to write a profile of her, got so drunk with nerves beforehand that he ‘passed out with his head in the fish course and remained unconscious for some hours’. Meanwhile, Malcolm Muggeridge, who resigned from the Booker judging panel in 1971, was ‘the laziest television interviewer’ Amis had ever experienced. 

And it includes Amis’s account of the 1986 Booker Prize, where in his acceptance speech he joked that ‘until just now I had thought the Booker Prize a rather trivial, showbizzy caper, but now I considered it a very serious, reliable indicator of literary merit’. When some newspapers reported this as a straight disparagement of the prize, Amis made a note to himself. ‘Never make a joke against or about yourself that some little bastard can turn into a piece of shit and send your way.’ 

Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood 

Atwood’s memoir is a whopper of a book, but she reveals little of her inner life: this is a book of busy entertainment about her upbringing, marriage and work. And best of all, she gives accounts of most of her six Booker Prize shortlistings (including two victories). 

Atwood’s first shortlisting was in 1986 for The Handmaid’s Tale – for which she credits the book’s long life. She knew she didn’t ‘have a hope in hell of winning’, and when Kingsley Amis took the prize, her fellow shortlisted Canadian, Robertson Davies, remarked to her, ‘The English are very kind to their old entertainers’. Her second shortlisting, for Cat’s Eye in 1989, was also disappointing. But, she observes, ‘no literary prize depends on your own active participation, so you can’t exactly fail at it. More like Best Pig in Show: the pig stands there looking fat as someone else pins a ribbon on it’. 

For Alias Grace (shortlisted in 1996), Atwood also knew she wouldn’t win since the chair of the judges, Carmen Callil, ‘announced in her speech that we’d had enough of colonials and the Celtic fringe, and it was time for an English man to win’. (Graham Swift duly took the prize.) Finally, in 2000, her wait was over – as was her long-running wager with Beryl Bainbridge ‘as to which of us could get nominated for the Booker Prize the most times without actually winning’. The Blind Assassin won. ‘Whew, I thought. I no longer have to deal with reporters asking why I didn’t win,’ she writes, ‘only with the ones who’ll be saying why I shouldn’t have.’ 

Here is Where We Meet by John Berger 

Berger was always an iconoclastic writer – he famously attacked both the concept of literary awards and the Booker Prize sponsors in his acceptance speech when he won for G. in 1972 – and his approach to autobiography is no different. Here is Where We Meet, published in 2005, shows Berger mellowed but no less original: the book is structured as autofictional encounters with the ghosts of people Berger knew through his life. It is a work of great charm and beauty. 

These include memories of his daughter Katya, or Hubert, a neighbour in Islington – this was, Berger wants to make clear, before the area became fashionable – who looked ‘like a 19th century bookbinder’. The most beautifully recounted friendship is with Ken: ‘for six or seven years he was the most influential person in my life’. Berger was a teenager at a ‘lunatic boarding school’ when he met 40-year-old Ken: ‘the apoplectic headmaster threw a dining-room chair at the Latin teacher, and Ken, who happened to be between them, caught it with one hand in mid-flight’. There’s a beautiful scene where Ken and young John play cards and quoits with John’s parents, who can see how Ken’s mentorship has made their son grow up and ready to make his own life. 

Berger’s father did not cope well with his son going his own way: there were ‘cruel and bitter fights’, Berger writes, adding that ‘I’m writing this with a worn pencil whose marks are faint […] for what I’m saying, twenty-five years after his death, can still only be said in a whisper’. And mothers can never be fooled, even after death: in one imagined conversation, when Berger makes a reference to Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘Don’t show off!’ his mother retorts. ‘There’s nobody here to notice.’ 

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan 

‘Do you need all these books?’ Richard Flanagan’s father would ask him. ‘Doesn’t the library have them?’ This instilled in Flanagan a sense of shame at his bookshelves and their ‘vulgar display of possession’ – and such tormented emotions run all through his 2024 memoir Question 7. Like Julian Barnes’s memoirs, it blends personal history with essay – such as about the development of the atom bomb which saved the life of Flanagan’s father, a prisoner of war in Japan in 1945. (Readers of his 2014 Booker winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North will recognise the setting.) There is personal memory, too, in a breathtaking account of how Flanagan as a youth almost died – in some senses he feels he did die – while kayaking. 

Flanagan’s father was reserved, especially about his wartime experiences – when young Richard asked ‘how many Japs he had killed’, his father rejected the question with a ‘ferocity’ he had never shown before – but his mother was the opposite. Yet she was constrained by her society, in mid-century Tasmania. ‘She needed adventures and vistas [but] she had to make do with stillness, a suburban backlot […] and six kids.’ 

Question 7 also acknowledges that these people who gave us life can never truly be recreated in words. One section of the book consists simply of the words ‘My mother and my father—’ before breaking off into silence.