Booker Prize — Complete Guide: History, Winners 2024 & 2025, Indian Winners

Winning the Booker Prize is not just an honour — it is a commercial event. The publishing industry calls it the Booker bounce: the week a winner is announced, sales of the winning book typically spike by hundreds or thousands of percent. Paul Lynch's Prophet Song sold 1,500 percent more copies in the week after winning the 2023 prize than it had the week before. Anna Burns' Milkman saw an 880 percent sales jump in the week following her 2018 win, then a further 99 percent the week after that. For a literary novel that might have moved a few hundred copies a week in ordinary times, this kind of attention changes an author's career overnight — and the size of their audience permanently.

The prize has also shaped what gets read, taught, and remembered. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children won in 1981, was chosen by a panel as the best novel from the prize's first twenty-five years in 1993 (the Booker of Bookers), won a public vote as the best Booker winner of the first forty years in 2008, and is now routinely included in university syllabi across the world. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient was chosen the best of the fifty-year period in 2018 by a special Golden Booker panel. The prize creates a short list of books that readers return to decades later.

The controversy around the award is part of its personality. Judges have been publicly divided on shortlists. Authors have refused the prize. The 2014 eligibility expansion set off a debate that continues to surface whenever an American author wins. The 2019 decision to split the prize jointly between Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo — instead of choosing one — broke a rule that had been in place for decades and drew both celebration and criticism. In 2025, comedian, broadcaster and author Shabaz Ali hosted the red-carpet coverage on TikTok and Instagram, which is about as far as you can get from the smoke-and-whisky atmosphere of 1969. All of it — the reverence, the row, the sales spike — is what keeps the prize relevant.

Across more than five decades, the Booker has accumulated a set of records and firsts that appear regularly in competitive exams. The following covers the milestones that matter most.

The double winners — four authors have won twice:

J.M. Coetzee (South Africa) was the first person to win twice — Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999. After the second win he called the prize "the ultimate prize to win in the English-speaking world." Peter Carey (Australia) won for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. Hilary Mantel (UK) won for Wolf Hall in 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012, becoming both the first woman and the first British author to win twice and the first person to win the prize for two novels that were direct sequels in a trilogy. Her acceptance line — "you wait twenty years for a Booker Prize and two come along at once" — became one of the most-quoted remarks in the prize's history. Margaret Atwood (Canada) won for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and The Testaments in 2019.

Most shortlisted: Salman Rushdie holds the record with seven nominations. He won in 1981 for Midnight's Children — a novel structured around the birth of independent India — and was shortlisted six more times without winning again.

The 2019 joint prize: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo shared the prize that year, which broke a long-standing convention against splitting the award. Evaristo became the first Black British woman to win the Booker — her novel Girl, Woman, Other followed thirteen different British women across decades of intertwined lives.

Notable sequels: Three sequels have won in the prize's entire history — The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995), Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2012), and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (2019).

The Booker Dozen: From 2007 onwards the longlist was formally capped at twelve or thirteen books. Before that, it was much longer — twenty-two books were longlisted in 2004 and twenty-three in 2003.

Ireland: Despite its population, Ireland has produced more Booker nominees relative to its size than any other country. Thirty-eight Irish writers had been recognised by the time of the 2024 longlist.

Special awards: Three special retrospective prizes have been given. The Booker of Bookers (1993) went to Midnight's Children. The Best of the Booker (2008) — a public vote for the fortieth anniversary — also went to Midnight's Children. The Golden Booker (2018) — for the fiftieth anniversary — went to The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Five authors with Indian connections have won the Booker Prize between 1971 and 2008, making India — or at least the Indian literary imagination — a persistent presence in the prize's history.

V.S. Naipaul — In a Free State (1971)
V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad to Indian parents who had come to the Caribbean as indentured labourers generations earlier. In a Free State is not a traditional novel — it is a collection of three connected stories framed by a diary, all exploring what it means to be a person without a fixed home in a post-colonial world. Naipaul later won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2001), which puts him in the unusual company of authors who have held both that prize and the Booker. He is counted as an author of Indian descent though he was never an Indian citizen.

Salman Rushdie — Midnight's Children (1981)
Rushdie was born in Mumbai in 1947 and Midnight's Children draws directly on that biographical coincidence: its narrator, Saleem Sinai, is born at the exact stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 when India became independent, and his life becomes tangled with the history of the country itself. The novel won the Booker in 1981 and then won the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker public vote in 2008 — it is the only novel to have won both special retrospective prizes. Rushdie is the most-shortlisted author in the prize's history, nominated seven times in total.

Arundhati Roy — The God of Small Things (1997)
Roy was born in Shillong and grew up in Kerala, and The God of Small Things is set in a Syrian Christian family in a small town in Kerala. It follows fraternal twins Estha and Rahel across two timelines separated by a tragedy, and it circles the "love laws" — the unspoken rules about who is permitted to love whom — that fracture the family. It was Roy's debut novel and she has not published another novel since, though she has written extensively in other forms. She was the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize.

Kiran Desai — The Inheritance of Loss (2006)
Kiran Desai is the daughter of novelist Anita Desai, who was herself shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times without winning. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss moves between a decaying house in the Himalayan foothills of northeastern India and the kitchens of New York, following characters caught between the aspirations of migration and the losses it brings. It won the Booker in 2006 when Desai was thirty-five. In the 2025 Booker shortlist, Kiran Desai appeared again with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — the first time she had been shortlisted since her win nearly two decades earlier.

Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger (2008)
Adiga was born in Madras and educated in India, Australia and the United States before working as a journalist. The White Tiger is narrated by Balram Halwai, a driver from a poor Indian village who murders his employer and uses the stolen money to build a business in Bangalore. The novel is structured as a series of letters to the Premier of China, and its tone is darkly comic — a critique of the corruption embedded in the Indian economic boom years, told from the perspective of someone who benefited from it by the most transgressive means possible. It was Adiga's debut novel.

Winner: Samantha Harvey — Orbital (Jonathan Cape, UK)

Announced: 12 November 2024 at Old Billingsgate, London

Judges' chair: Edmund de Waal (author of The Hare with Amber Eyes)

Orbital takes place over a single day — sixteen orbits of the Earth — aboard the International Space Station, where six astronauts and cosmonauts are ninety minutes into a mission that will last nine months. Nothing dramatic happens in the conventional narrative sense. There is no villain, no catastrophe, no love story with a resolution. What Harvey does instead is stay inside the consciousness of people who have removed themselves from the world they know and are looking at it from outside — watching storms, coastlines, the progress of seasons, the lights of cities at night — while the ordinary weight of their lives on Earth continues to press on them from a distance of four hundred kilometres.

Judge chair Edmund de Waal described it as "a book about a wounded world" and noted that the panel's unanimity about Orbital was unusual — they chose it not through elimination but through a consensus that formed as they kept returning to it throughout their deliberations. Harvey had been longlisted for the Booker fifteen years before this win, then nothing. She was forty-nine when she won.

The 2024 shortlist was notable in its own right: five of the six shortlisted authors were women, which the prize described as a first in its history. The shortlist also included Percival Everett's James — a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved character Jim — which had been widely tipped to win. The trophy was presented to Harvey by 2023 winner Paul Lynch. In her acceptance speech, Harvey dedicated the prize to those who speak for and not against the Earth and for the dignity of all human and non-human life.

2024 shortlist:

• Orbital — Samantha Harvey (UK) [Winner]
• James — Percival Everett (USA)
• The Safekeep — Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands)
• Stone Yard Devotional — Charlotte Wood (Australia)
• Held — Anne Michaels (Canada)
• Creation Lake — Rachel Kushner (USA)

Winner: David Szalay — Flesh (Jonathan Cape, UK)

Announced: 10 November 2025 at Old Billingsgate, London

Judges' chair: Roddy Doyle (1993 Booker winner for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — the first Booker Prize winner to chair a Booker judging panel)

Flesh follows a man named István from adolescence in a Hungarian housing estate through to old age. The novel tracks his migration to London, his rise into the world of the super-rich, and his slow unravelling through a series of events that feel partly accidental and partly inevitable. Szalay writes in deliberately spare prose — the judges noted that it was "the absence of words" that paradoxically allowed them to know the protagonist better, not less well. You finish the novel without knowing what István looks like, and this never feels like a gap; it is, in Roddy Doyle's framing, the book's great strength.

Szalay was born in Montreal to a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother, grew up in London, and lives in Vienna — a biography that tracks something similar to the displacement and cultural in-between-ness that Flesh explores. He had been shortlisted for the Booker in 2016 for All That Man Is, a series of nine stories about men at various life stages, and spent nearly a decade between that shortlisting and this win. Flesh is his sixth work of fiction.

The 2025 ceremony was broadcast live on BBC Radio 4's Front Row, hosted by Samira Ahmed. The trophy was presented by Samantha Harvey, the previous year's winner. An extract from Flesh had been performed by Stormzy as part of the shortlist films — an unusual pairing that the prize described as reflecting Szalay's interest in physical experience and embodiment as subjects.

2025 shortlist:

• Flesh — David Szalay (UK/Hungary) [Winner]
• Audition — Katie Kitamura (USA)
• Flashlight — Susan Choi (USA)
• The Land in Winter — Andrew Miller (UK)
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — Kiran Desai (India/USA)
• The Rest of Our Lives — Ben Markovits (USA)

• SSC (CGL, CHSL, MTS): Two questions are near-certain from recent years — 2024 winner (Samantha Harvey, Orbital, UK) and 2025 winner (David Szalay, Flesh, first Hungarian-British winner). Also lock in: Arundhati Roy — The God of Small Things, 1997 (first Indian woman to win); Kiran Desai — The Inheritance of Loss, 2006; Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger, 2008 (debut novel). The prize money (£50,000) and the establishment year (1969) appear in standard GK questions.
• UPSC Prelims: Three angles matter for UPSC. First, the double winners — four authors have won twice: J.M. Coetzee (1983, 1999), Peter Carey (1988, 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009, 2012), Margaret Atwood (2000, 2019). Mantel is specifically the first woman and first British author to win twice. Second, the 2019 joint prize between Atwood and Evaristo is a polity/current affairs question type. Third, the eligibility expansion in 2014 — until then, only Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe authors were eligible.
• Railway (NTPC, Group D): Foundational facts at Railway difficulty — prize established in 1969; sponsored by Booker McConnell; first winner P.H. Newby (Something to Answer For); prize was called Man Booker Prize from 2002 to 2018; now called Booker Prize again. Also: prize money started at £5,000, now £50,000.
• Banking (IBPS, SBI, RBI): Most recent two winners are standard Banking current affairs — 2025: David Szalay, Flesh; 2024: Samantha Harvey, Orbital. The International Booker Prize 2024 winner — Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (translated by Michael Hofmann) — also appears in banking GK rounds. Kiran Desai's reappearance on the 2025 shortlist (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny) is a potential trick question.
• Common exam traps to avoid:
  1. The prize was called the Man Booker Prize from 2002–2018, not from 1969. Do not say it was always called that.
  2. V.S. Naipaul won the Booker in 1971 but was Trinidadian of Indian descent — not an Indian citizen. The first Indian citizen to win is debated; Rushdie (UK-Indian), Roy (Indian citizen), Desai, Adiga are the clearest Indian connections.
  3. Hilary Mantel was the only woman to win twice — Margaret Atwood also won twice, but with different novels twelve years apart (The Blind Assassin in 2000, The Testaments in 2019). Mantel's two wins were consecutive sequels in a trilogy.
  4. The International Booker Prize and the Booker Prize are separate awards — one for translated fiction, one for fiction originally written in English.
  5. The 2019 prize was jointly awarded — both Atwood and Evaristo won. This broke a rule against splitting the prize.