Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker winner is a multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality
The Booker Prize 2000
No longer the bridesmaid: after three shortlistings, the prolific and multifarious Margaret Atwood garnered her first Booker Prize win with The Blind Assassin.
In the lead-up to the award, the prize administrator, the mischievous Martyn Goff, said of the year’s shortlist: ‘In 30 years, there hasn’t previously been a time when I have felt unable to forecast a winner. This year any of the six could win.’
Atwood’s novel, which contained not just a book within a book but a book within a book within a book, was a deft mixture of history, love story and a meditation on the shiftiness of truth. Time magazine later named it the best novel of 2000.
The Blind Assassin
Winner of The Booker Prize 2000
- Published by
- Bloomsbury
Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker winner is a multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality
The shortlist
Through the eyes of a young girl, Trezza Azzopardi reveals a world rarely seen in fiction - the gritty underworld of Cardiff in the mid-20th century
Set in the US in the 1970s, Michael Collins’ noirish mystery explores the obsessions that a brutal murder awakens in a small Midwestern town
Kazuo Ishiguro’s adventurous combination of historical fiction and detective story, set largely in England and Shanghai of the 1930s
Narrated by over 20 voices, Matthew Kneale’s ambitious historical novel brings a past age to vivid and memorable life
A haunting fiction from Brian O'Doherty about a poor and isolated Irish village where all the women of potentially child-bearing age mysteriously die
