![The Remains of the Day](/sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_tiny/public/images/the_remains_of_the_day.jpg?itok=RcSOU1ma 91w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_small/public/images/the_remains_of_the_day.jpg?itok=Av-nuqx0 113w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_medium/public/images/the_remains_of_the_day.jpg?itok=0p6IdsZx 147w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_large/public/images/the_remains_of_the_day.jpg?itok=NFGLzUP9 160w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_x_large/public/images/the_remains_of_the_day.jpg?itok=LwGAsqaA 201w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_huge/public/images/the_remains_of_the_day.jpg?itok=4z6HLt19 264w)
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.
While the three male judges were keen on Amis’s novel, both Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil thought the depiction of Nicola Six was misogynistic and Gee threatened resignation if it made the shortlist. The women won the day.
The fuss, however, failed to overshadow the merits of Ishiguro’s novel – stylish, nuanced, with a memorably unreliable narrator in the butler Stevens – which was later turned into an Oscar-nominated film scripted by another Booker Prize winner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Winner The Booker Prize 1989
By James Kelman
By Rose Tremain