The Booker prize is synonymous with controversy and, while praise for David Szalay’s subtly innovative Flesh was near-unanimous when it won the £50,000 prize this week, plenty of previous winners have divided readers.
There have been rows and tantrums among the judges, authors have used their acceptance speeches to make political statements and the fallout has fizzed for days, spilling into newspapers and book clubs.
Here are the most controversial Booker winners ever.
G by John Berger (1972)
John Berger’s novel G, which is both experimental and enthralling, is one of the most original works to win the prize. It is the story of the eponymous protagonist, a Casanova-figure, his misadventures and political epiphanies.
Berger took his victory as an opportunity to make his own political point. He announced in his acceptance speech that he would be donating half of his winnings to the British Black Panthers as reparations for the way that Booker McConnell, the company that sponsored the prize between its establishment in 1968 and 2002, had in its trading exploited people of the Caribbean for over a century.
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Read More The Bone People by Keri Hulme (1985)
Perhaps the most divisive and surprising winner ever, New Zealander Hulme spent 12 years writing this story of a disaffected painter, a speechless boy and the foster-carer who beats him. It was rejected by several publishers, who presumably thought it unwieldy, before a feminist press put it out. Its most brutal scenes are difficult to read and Hulme’s pseudo-poetic prose makes some passages a slog. A shame because the story at its heart is moving.
Some readers found its violent scenes gratuitous (including Joanna Lumley who was one of the judges) while others were unconvinced by the Maori elements, although admirers countered that such criticisms reinforced colonial prejudices. Hulme, who died in 2021, did not publish another finished novel.
How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman (1994)
The story of a likeable petty criminal who wakes up blind on the first page and encounters police brutality in his attempt to find out what happened, divided the prize judges (one of whom called it “crap”) and critics (one labelled Kelman’s use of expletives and the Glaswegian vernacular “literary vandalism”). This underestimates Kelman’s art which puts him in the tradition of modernists such as James Joyce and Franz Kafka.
Kelman’s most recent novel God’s Teeth indicated that today he is amused by the Booker fallout; it features a curmudgeonly old author who is best known for the moral panic that greeted his “Banker Prize” winning novel.
Last Orders by Graham Swift (1996)
This is a curious one. Six months after Last Orders won the Booker prize, an Australian academic accused its author Graham Swift of plagiarising the novel’s structure, plot and use of multiple narrators from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Swift said in response that there was “a little homage” to Faulkner at work in his novel, a funny and affecting story about four south London friends taking a butcher’s ashes to Margate.
One of the judges, A.N. Wilson, was unhappy and said that, had he been aware of the similarities between the books, the prize would have gone to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.
Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (2003)
Writers do not win prizes for their morality but the life of DBC Pierre is almost as gripping as his Booker-winning first novel. Weeks before he was awarded the prize, it was reported that the 42-year-old author, who was writing under a pseudonym in which the initials stand for “Dirty But Clean”, was a conman who had persuaded somebody to sell their house and kept the money.
Pierre claimed that he would use the proceeds from his novel’s sales, and the Booker prize money, to pay off debts and make things right with those he had wronged. The book itself is an exhilarating satire about a lying Texan boy who goes on the run after a shooting at his school.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
The 2011 Booker judges were castigated for choosing what was perceived as a lightweight shortlist. In hindsight, that looks unfair, with Stephen Kelman’s superbly sustained debut Pigeon English and Patrick DeWitt’s inventive The Sister’s Brothers in contention. Julian Barnes was the literary titan on the list and it was no surprise when he won for The Sense of an Ending – a short novel about the unreliability of memory.
Unfortunately, the book itself was so dull and slight that it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that, after being previously overlooked for better works, Barnes was given a lifetime achievement award, which is not what the Booker is supposed to be.
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2016)
The decision to make American authors eligible for the Booker prize from 2014 was met with complaints that it would limit opportunities for writers from other parts of the English-speaking world and produce a homogenised literary culture. It was only two years before an American won – Paul Beatty for a jagged racial satire that was as cutting as it was hilarious – and, while there has only been one subsequent winner from the US, American writers have been ubiquitous among the nominees. There were two, plus one UK/US writer, on this year’s shortlist of six.
Joint-winners Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo
Booker judges have one job – to choose the best English language novel of the year – and in 2019 they failed to do it. Margaret Atwood had already won the Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin but, allegedly, one of the judges threatened to resign if the Canadian was not awarded the prize again for The Testaments. The other judges wanted Girl, Woman, Other – a vibrant novel of linked stories about black British women’s experiences – by Bernardine Evaristo to win.
In the end, Atwood and Evaristo were declared joint winners. The latter was the first black woman to win the Booker but for many sharing the prize made her victory bittersweet.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)
In the past decade-and-a-half, Ireland has produced a seemingly endless stream of world-beating novelists. Many of them – such as Donal Ryan, Sally Rooney, Claire Keegan – would have been worthy Booker prize winners.
As would Paul Murray, who was on the shortlist in 2023 for The Bee Sting and can consider himself to have been robbed by the judges’ decision to give the prize to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song – a pretentious dystopia that is not prophetic, because it tells us nothing we don’t already know about our world, and is dogged by a clunky lyricism that falls flat on every page.
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