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Reading List · The Booker PrizeEvery Woman Who Won the Booker Prize
The Booker Prize has been awarded for a novel in English since 1969. Bernice Rubens became the first woman to win it in 1970, and by the 2025 prize 19 women had won, two of them twice: Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and Margaret Atwood, for The Blind Assassin and The Testaments. Together their winning books run from 1970s India and apartheid South Africa to Tudor England, the Troubles and a space station in orbit.
This list includes every woman who has won the main Booker Prize, one entry each, in chronological order of first win. The 2026 winner is due to be announced on 9 November 2026, after this list was compiled. Each entry starts with the winning book and, where useful, suggests a second title by the same writer.
Nineteen Booker-winning women, and where to start with each
Bernice Rubens
1923–2004 · Cardiff, Wales
Bernice Rubens was a Welsh novelist whose fiction, in the words of a Guardian obituary, focused on the more disturbing aspects of human behaviour. Her novels often deal with Jewish family life, secrets and mental breakdown. Before writing full-time she taught at a Birmingham grammar school and later made documentary films.
In 1970 she became the first woman to win the Booker Prize, and she remains the only Welsh winner. Her earlier novel Madame Sousatzka, drawn from her brother’s experience as a child piano prodigy, was filmed in 1988.
Read Rubens if you are interested in dark family comedy and the first woman to win the prize.
Start with The Elected Member (1969). Norman Zweck, an amphetamine addict who sees silverfish wherever he goes, slowly reveals the secrets and tragedies of his Jewish family. Or Madame Sousatzka (1962). Her second novel, based on her brother Harold’s experiences as a child piano prodigy with his teacher.
Nadine Gordimer
1923–2014 · Springs, South Africa
Nadine Gordimer wrote novels and short stories about moral and racial questions in South Africa, above all apartheid, and about the way love and politics press on ordinary people’s choices. Several of her books were banned by the apartheid government, and she joined the African National Congress while it was still illegal.
She shared the 1974 Booker Prize with Stanley Middleton and in 1991 won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African woman to do so. Her work runs from The Lying Days (1953) to No Time Like the Present (2012).
Read Gordimer if you want fiction that looks hard at power, race and complicity.
Start with The Conservationist (1974). Mehring, a wealthy white industrialist, tries to hold on to his farm and his world while an unidentified corpse buried on his land refuses to stay forgotten. Or July’s People (1981). During a fictional civil war that overturns apartheid, the liberal white Smales family flees Johannesburg to the village of their servant, July.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
1927–2013 · Cologne, Germany
Born in Germany, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala lived for many years in India, and much of her fiction observes India’s Westernising middle class, arranged marriage, and the Europeans who arrive seeking enlightenment and leave disillusioned. Critics noted her detached, comic tone and compared her social comedy to Jane Austen’s.
She also wrote 23 screenplays, many for Merchant Ivory, and won Academy Awards for A Room with a View and Howards End. She is the only person to have won both the Booker Prize and an Oscar.
Read Jhabvala if you like cool, ironic novels about outsiders in India.
Start with Heat and Dust (1975). Two stories run side by side: Olivia, the wife of a British civil servant in 1920s India who is drawn into the life of a local Nawab, and the woman who travels to India decades later to piece her story together.
Iris Murdoch
1919–1999 · Dublin, Ireland
Iris Murdoch, also a philosopher, published 26 novels between Under the Net (1954) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). Her fiction deals with good and evil, sexual relationships and the power of the unconscious, often through clever upper-middle-class characters caught in moral dilemmas and drawn to a dominant ‘enchanter’ figure.
Her novels are crowded with incident and often comic, but their underlying subject is moral attention: how people try, and fail, to see one another clearly. The Sea, the Sea, her Booker winner, is a natural place to begin, and Under the Net shows where she started.
Read Murdoch if you enjoy big, intelligent novels of love, obsession and moral confusion.
Start with The Sea, the Sea (1978). Charles Arrowby, a retired stage director who has withdrawn to a house by the sea, becomes consumed by jealousy when he meets his first love, Hartley, after decades apart. Or Under the Net (1954). Her first novel, following Jake Donaghue, a struggling writer and translator, through work, love and fame in London.
All Iris Murdoch books →Penelope Fitzgerald
1916–2000 · Lincoln, England
Penelope Fitzgerald began publishing late: a biography of Edward Burne-Jones in 1975 and her first novel, The Golden Child, in 1977, when she was about 60. She wrote eight more short novels, including The Bookshop (1978), The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990).
Three of her other novels were shortlisted for the Booker. The Blue Flower won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. Her books are brief and dryly funny, suited to readers who like compression.
Read Fitzgerald if you prefer short, precise novels with a quiet comic edge.
Start with Offshore (1979). A small community of people living on houseboats on the Thames at Battersea in 1961. Or The Blue Flower (1995). Her last novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1997.
Anita Brookner
1928–2016 · Herne Hill, London
Anita Brookner was an art historian first: the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge, and later a Reader at the Courtauld Institute. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, at 53 and went on to write 23 more.
Her novels explore emotional loss, isolation and disappointment in love among intelligent, middle-class women who do not quite fit in. They are restrained and closely observed; Hotel du Lac, her fourth novel, is the usual starting point.
Read Brookner if you like quiet, exact novels about loneliness and self-respect.
Start with Hotel du Lac (1984). Edith Hope, a romance novelist, is sent to a quiet hotel on Lake Geneva after a secret affair and a called-off wedding.
All Anita Brookner books →Keri Hulme
1947–2021 · Christchurch, New Zealand
Keri Hulme was a New Zealand writer of Kāi Tahu Māori, Orkney Scots and English descent. Her work draws on Māori, Celtic and Norse mythology and deals with isolation and postcolonial identity. She also published short stories, poetry and an autobiographical book about the coasts of the South Island.
The Bone People was turned down by several publishers before the feminist Spiral Collective issued it in 1984. It made her the first New Zealander, and the first author of a debut novel, to win the Booker.
Read Hulme if you want an unconventional, demanding novel rooted in New Zealand.
Start with The Bone People (1984). On the South Island coast, a reclusive artist, Kerewin Holmes, forms a fragile bond with a mute, traumatised boy and his foster father, whose relationship is marked by violence.
Penelope Lively
Born 1933 · Cairo, Egypt
Penelope Lively began as a children’s author: The Ghost of Thomas Kempe won the Carnegie Medal in 1973. Her first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield (1977), was shortlisted for the Booker, as was According to Mark. Her fiction keeps returning to memory and the gap between official and personal history.
Moon Tiger won in 1987. She was made a Dame in 2012 for services to literature. Readers interested in how a life is remembered, and retold, will find her a natural fit.
Read Lively if you are drawn to novels about memory and how history is told.
Start with Moon Tiger (1987). As she lies dying in a hospital bed, a woman looks back over her turbulent life.
A. S. Byatt
1936–2023 · Sheffield, England
A. S. Byatt wrote large, allusive novels full of art, ideas and literary history, including the Quartet about the Potter family that begins with The Virgin in the Garden (1978). She also wrote short fiction and criticism and was made a Dame in 1999.
Possession won the 1990 Booker and was filmed in 2002. The Children’s Book, set between 1895 and the First World War, was shortlisted in 2009 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Read Byatt if you like literary detective stories with layers of pastiche.
Start with Possession (1990). Two present-day academics are drawn together as they research the hidden relationship between two fictional Victorian poets. Or The Children’s Book (2009). A long family novel set from 1895 to the end of the First World War.
Pat Barker
Born 1943 · Thornaby-on-Tees, England
Pat Barker began with Union Street (1982), seven linked stories about working-class women in the north of England. She is best known for the Regeneration Trilogy about the First World War, which draws on war poets and the army doctor W. H. R. Rivers and his work with traumatised soldiers.
The Ghost Road, the trilogy’s final part, won the 1995 Booker. Her later novels retell the Trojan War from the women’s side, starting with The Silence of the Girls (2018).
Read Barker if you want fiction about war, trauma and its aftermath.
Start with The Ghost Road (1995). The final part of the Regeneration Trilogy, following Billy Prior and the doctor W. H. R. Rivers through the last stage of the First World War. Or Regeneration (1991). The first book of the trilogy, set at Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Rivers treats shell-shocked officers including Siegfried Sassoon.
Arundhati Roy
Born 1961 · Shillong, India
Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, is semi-autobiographical, drawing on her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala. After it won the 1997 Booker she wrote mainly political essays, collected in books such as The Algebra of Infinite Justice and Azadi.
Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, followed twenty years later, in 2017. In between she became known as a political essayist; My Seditious Heart (2019) collects her non-fiction. Readers who come to her through the first novel will find the essays a more argumentative voice.
Read Roy if you want a lyrical family novel set in Kerala.
Start with The God of Small Things (1997). The twins Estha and Rahel, children in 1969 Kerala, are reunited as adults in 1993, as the novel moves between the two years to show what broke their family. Or The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Her second novel, published twenty years after the first.
All Arundhati Roy books →Margaret Atwood
Born 1939 · Ottawa, Canada
Margaret Atwood has published 18 novels alongside poetry and other work. She is best known for speculative fiction, a term she prefers to science fiction, including The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the MaddAddam Trilogy, and for historical fiction such as Alias Grace (1996).
She won the Booker for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and shared it in 2019 for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, set fifteen years after the original and told by three women.
Read Atwood if you like intricate, sharp-edged novels about women and power.
Start with The Blind Assassin (2000). The elderly Iris Chase Griffen looks back on her life and her sister Laura’s, while a novel-within-the-novel, credited to Laura, tells another story. Or The Testaments (2019). The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, set fifteen years later and narrated by three women.
All Margaret Atwood books →Kiran Desai
Born 1971 · India
Kiran Desai, born in India and the daughter of the novelist Anita Desai, published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998; it won the Betty Trask Award. Her fiction deals with identity, migration, culture clash and the long shadow of colonialism.
The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker and the National Book Critics Circle Award. After a gap of nearly two decades she published The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025), shortlisted for the 2025 Booker.
Read Desai if you are interested in migration and two worlds pulling at one family.
Start with The Inheritance of Loss (2006). In 1986 an orphan, Sai, lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong, while their cook’s son Biju tries to build a life as an illegal immigrant in the United States. Or The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025). Her third novel, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Anne Enright
Born 1962 · Dublin, Ireland
Anne Enright writes about Irish families: what they hide, what siblings and parents owe each other, and how the past keeps surfacing. Her novels run from The Wig My Father Wore (1995) to The Wren, the Wren (2023), with The Green Road and Actress in between.
The Gathering, her fourth novel, won the 2007 Booker. Her later novels include The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and The Green Road (2015). She was the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, from 2015 to 2018. Her prose is sharp and unsentimental.
Read Enright if you want frank, unsentimental fiction about Irish families.
Start with The Gathering (2007). Veronica Hegarty, one of a large Dublin family, gathers with her siblings for the wake of her brother Liam, who drowned himself, and traces his drinking back to a childhood stay at their grandmother’s.
All Anne Enright books →Hilary Mantel
1952–2022 · Glossop, England
Hilary Mantel wrote historical and contemporary fiction, from A Place of Greater Safety (1992), about the French revolutionaries, to Beyond Black (2005), about a medium. Her memoir Giving Up the Ghost appeared in 2003. She is best known for the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII.
Wolf Hall won in 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012, making her the first woman and first British writer to win the Booker twice. The Mirror & the Light (2020) completed the trilogy.
Read Mantel if you want immersive historical fiction told from inside a powerful mind.
Start with Wolf Hall (2009). The first novel of the trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell from his flight from home as a teenager to power at Henry VIII’s court, ending in 1535 with the death of Thomas More. Or Bring Up the Bodies (2012). The second novel of the Cromwell trilogy, which also won the Booker.
All Hilary Mantel books →Eleanor Catton
Born 1985 · London, Ontario, Canada
Eleanor Catton was born in Canada and grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her debut, The Rehearsal (2008), began as her master’s thesis. Her third novel, Birnam Wood (2023), is a contemporary thriller about a group of young climate activists.
At 28 she became the youngest Booker winner, with The Luminaries, which at 832 pages is the longest book to win. She later wrote the scripts for the 2020 television adaptation.
Read Catton if you like long, elaborately constructed historical novels.
Start with The Luminaries (2013). An 832-page novel set on New Zealand’s goldfields in 1866. Or Birnam Wood (2023). A contemporary thriller about young climate activists.
Anna Burns
Born 1962 · Belfast, Northern Ireland
Anna Burns writes darkly comic fiction about violence and community in Northern Ireland. No Bones follows a girl growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, and Little Constructions (2007) concerns a woman from a family of criminals seeking revenge. The short Mostly Hero appeared in 2014.
Milkman made her the first Northern Irish writer to win the Booker, and it also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orwell Prize for political fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award.
Read Burns if you don’t mind an unusual voice and want a novel about rumour and fear.
Start with Milkman (2018). In 1970s Belfast, an unnamed 18-year-old known as ‘middle sister’ is stalked by an older paramilitary man known as the Milkman.
Bernardine Evaristo
Born 1959 · Eltham, London
Bernardine Evaristo has written verse novels, including Lara and The Emperor’s Babe, about a Black teenage girl in Roman London, as well as Mr Loverman (2013), about a closeted older Caribbean Londoner, and the memoir Manifesto (2021). Her work centres Black British lives across centuries.
She shared the 2019 Booker with Margaret Atwood and was the first Black woman to win it. She served as President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2021 to 2025.
Read Evaristo if you want a many-voiced, energetic novel about contemporary Britain.
Start with Girl, Woman, Other (2019). Twelve mostly Black British women, aged 19 to 93, tell interlocking stories of family, work, ambition and identity. Or Mr Loverman (2013). An older Caribbean Londoner reconsiders his life and his long-hidden sexuality after fifty years of marriage.
All Bernardine Evaristo books →Samantha Harvey
Born 1975 · Kent, England
Samantha Harvey’s novels are short and formally varied: The Wilderness (2009) is narrated by a man developing Alzheimer’s, Dear Thief (2014) is one long letter, and The Western Wind (2018) is set around a fifteenth-century priest in Somerset. The Shapeless Unease (2020) is an account of her insomnia.
Orbital won the 2024 Booker and the Hawthornden Prize, and she was the first woman to win the Booker since 2019. The novel blends literary fiction, science fiction and philosophy; Mark Haddon called it one of the most beautiful novels he had read in a long time.
Read Harvey if you want a short, contemplative novel that is light on plot.
Start with Orbital (2023). Astronauts aboard a space station pass through one day of low Earth orbits, looking down at the planet below. Or The Western Wind (2018). A novel about a fifteenth-century priest in Somerset.
Which Booker winner should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For the first woman to win — Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member (1969)
- For historical fiction — Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)
- For a short, dry, funny novel — Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979)
- For a family novel set in India — Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
- For a long historical novel — Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (2013)
- For a short, contemplative read — Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
How many women have won the Booker Prize?
Up to and including the 2025 prize, 19 women have won the Booker Prize. Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood have each won twice, so women account for 21 wins.
Who was the first woman to win the Booker Prize?
Bernice Rubens, who won in 1970 for The Elected Member. She remains the only Welsh writer to have won.
Has any woman won the Booker twice?
Yes. Hilary Mantel won for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and Margaret Atwood won for The Blind Assassin (2000) and, jointly, for The Testaments (2019).
Who is the most recent woman to win?
Samantha Harvey, who won in 2024 for Orbital. The 2025 prize went to David Szalay for Flesh, and the 2026 winner is due to be announced on 9 November 2026.
Which woman was the youngest Booker winner?
Eleanor Catton, who won in 2013 at 28 with The Luminaries, which is also the longest book to have won.
Who was the first Black woman to win the Booker?
Bernardine Evaristo, for Girl, Woman, Other, in 2019. She shared that year’s prize with Margaret Atwood.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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