The Booker Prize Winners of the Last 20 Years

2023: Paul Lynch's "Prophet Song" is a searing exploration of a society unraveling at the seams, told through the lens of one family's struggle to survive. Set in a near-future Ireland, the novel paints a chilling portrait of how quickly the familiar can become foreign when authoritarianism takes hold. As Booker Prize judge Esi Edugyan notes, this "soul-shattering and true" work is one readers "will not soon forget."

2022: In this novel set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, photographer Maali Almeida wakes up dead in a celestial visa office with no idea who killed him. Now, he must navigate his way across seven moons in the afterlife to share the photos that will expose the civil war's brutalities.

2021: An epic South African drama that tells the story of the white Swart family, divided by a promise made to their Black maid on her deathbed. The novel follows the family over thirty years, as they grapple with guilt, failure, and the ceaseless march of history.

2020: A poignant tale of addiction, sexuality, and love, which follows the young Shuggie as he navigates life in a Glasgow public housing complex against the backdrop of 1980s Thatcherite Britain.

2019: Evaristo, who shared the prize with Atwood this year, wrote a moving and hopeful portrait of 12 Black British women from vastly different lives and intersecting identities, showing a side of Britain that is rarely celebrated in mainstream media and culture.

2019 (also): Set 15 years after The Handmaid's Tale, with the theocratic Gilead regime clinging to power, the book follows three very different women, including Aunt Lydia, as their destinies barrel towards a collision.

2018: Set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Milkman follows the unnamed 18-year-old “middle sister” as she is relentlessly pursued by a paramilitary officer, known as Milkman. As rumors spread about the nature of their relationship, violence lurks just around the corner.

2017: The novel explores President Lincoln's grief for his recently departed son, Willie, and mostly takes place in the supernatural bardo, a liminal state between death and rebirth, where ghosts fight over Willie's soul.

2016: A biting satire which opens with our protagonist, a Black man named 'Bonbon,' on trial before the Supreme Court for his plot to introduce slavery and segregation to his southern California town in order restore its incorporated status.

2015: This fictional exploration of Jamaica’s tumultuous past centers around the storied assassination attempt on Bob Marley and his family in 1976. The books follows an eclectic group of characters, moving between Kingston and New York across two decades.