Peter Carey’s rich and endlessly inventive tale about two unusual characters in 19th-century Australia won the Booker Prize in 1988
By Peter Carey
The Booker Prize 1988
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.
Having been shortlisted in 1985, the Australian Carey triumphed in a year when books made the news for the wrong reasons. The approbation that greeted Carey’s quirky tale of a glass church and a bet in rural 19th-century Australia was in glaring contrast to the firestorm that hit Rushdie with the publication of The Satanic Verses.
The Iranian fatwa issued against him left him in hiding under police protection. Although the novel was shortlisted, literary prizes suddenly seemed to belong to a parallel universe.
Oscar and Lucinda
Winner of The Booker Prize 1988
- By
- Peter Carey
- Published by
- Faber & Faber
Peter Carey’s rich and endlessly inventive tale about two unusual characters in 19th-century Australia won the Booker Prize in 1988
The shortlist
Bruce Chatwin’s unique portrait of a collector traces the mixed fortunes of his enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s intriguing historical novel, a woman inexplicably disappears as the shadow of impending revolution hangs over imperial Russia
The final volume of David Lodge’s witty Campus Trilogy is set around the unlikely relationship between a senior manager and a left-wing academic
By David Lodge
Salman Rushdie’s magical realist epic. Hugely complex and multilayered, it remains one of the most controversial books in recent literary history
Marina Warner’s imaginary memoir of an Italian family, which in turn explores the passions and prejudices of the narrator’s imagination
