2010-2020: 5 Booker Prize Winners

Recently I made a plan to pick out a Booker Prize winner for each year and read them. A random year, a random book - so much talent.

The Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world, given annually for the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Winners receive £50,000 and, more valuably, a career-transforming boost in sales and critical standing; many past winners see their books rocket up bestseller lists within days.

So here are five most recent reads...

'Milkman' by Anna Burns (2018)

In an unnamed city, gripped by an unnamed conflict, an eighteen-year-old known only as "middle sister" becomes the target of a senior paramilitary figure known as the milkman, and simply being noticed becomes a kind of danger. Belfast-born Burns, the first Northern Irish writer to win the Booker, wrote much of the novel while relying on food banks and housing charities to get by. What sets 'Milkman' apart is its sheer formal audacity: no character is named, sentences spiral and double back on themselves in long, breathless paragraphs, and the effect is genuinely immersive rather than gimmicky, you feel the suffocating logic of gossip and surveillance from the inside. Chair of judges Kwame Anthony Appiah called it a novel unlike anything the panel had read before, and that's the truth of it: this is a book that reinvents how trauma, silence, and small-town paranoia can be rendered on the page, using dark humour as a scalpel rather than a release valve. It deserved to win because it did something the Booker rarely rewards, it made experimental, demanding prose feel urgent and alive rather than academic, proving difficulty and readability aren't actually opposites.

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'The Finkler Question' by Howard Jacobson (2010)

Julian Treslove, a directionless former BBC producer who makes his living as a celebrity lookalike, is mugged one night in an incident with faint anti-Semitic undertones and becomes strangely, obsessively fixated on Jewishness, or what he privately calls "the Finkler question," after his old friend Sam Finkler, a self-help philosopher and reluctant, ambivalent Jew. Jacobson, a British novelist known for his sharp comic voice and unsparing wit, builds an entire tragicomedy out of Treslove's messy, half-formed longing to belong to an identity he was never part of. What makes this such a deserving winner is its tonal balancing act: it's genuinely, consistently funny, closer to Larry David than literary fiction usually dares to be, while carrying real grief and moral seriousness about aging, friendship, and cultural belonging underneath every joke. Jacobson refuses easy conclusions about Jewish identity in modern Britain, letting the comedy do the work that a more solemn treatment couldn't. It deserved to win because it proved a novel could be laugh-out-loud funny and quietly devastating in the very same paragraph; a rare, difficult trick, pulled off with real control.

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'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James (2015)

Sprawling across three decades and more than seventy narrators, James's novel orbits a real, near-mythical event: the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley, referred to throughout only as "the Singer," at his Kingston home. From that single flashpoint, James spins outward into Jamaica's gang warfare, CIA entanglements, and the drug trade's brutal migration to 1980s New York. Jamaican-born and now dividing his time between Minnesota and New York, James became the first Jamaican author to win the Booker, and the judges reportedly reached their decision in under two hours, floored by a novel that swings, in James's own words, from street patois to near-biblical intensity, often within a single page. What makes it extraordinary is its sheer vocal range: dozens of utterly distinct voices, each rendered with total conviction, refusing readers any single, comfortable perspective on violence or history. It deserved to win because it's a genuinely maximalist achievement, ambitious, unruly, and demanding in a way the Booker rarely rewards, proving that scale and control aren't mutually exclusive when the ear behind it is this precise.

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'Shuggie Bain' by Douglas Stuart (2020)

Set in 1980s Glasgow, Stuart's devastating debut follows Shuggie, a gentle, "no right" boy, as he tries to care for his alcoholic mother Agnes amid poverty and Thatcher-era decline. Stuart, Scottish-born and largely self-taught as a novelist after years working in fashion, drew on his own childhood to write it, and that lived intimacy shows in every unflinching page. It deserved to win because it renders addiction and working-class hardship with total, unsentimental tenderness, never miserable for its own sake, always precise about love's persistence even in ruin. A modern classic of grief and devotion.

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'Girl, Woman, Other' by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

Evaristo's novel follows twelve interconnected characters, mostly Black British women, across generations, sexualities, and social classes, each given their own vivid, propulsive chapter. Evaristo, a poet and novelist who'd been publishing for decades before this joint win alongside Margaret Atwood, writes in a loose, punctuation-light "fusion fiction" style that reads like verse without ever losing narrative momentum. It deserved its place because it expanded whose stories the Booker centres, and did so through genuine formal innovation rather than novelty, polyphonic, generous, and structurally daring, it captures an entire, overlooked cross-section of modern Britain with equal tenderness for every voice it holds.

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