Collecting Booker Prize Winners
Can I Make Money From Them?
Is It Worth Collecting Booker Prize Winners?
You need to consider two things before you decide:
- Can you afford it?
- Do you have the time?
Collecting Booker Prize winners can be expensive as there are many titles that cost several hundred pounds as they are in great demand being in the hands of collectors. If you can afford to purchase them then it is worthwhile as your profit will grow over the years. If you have the time to research and collect and keep your collection for a few years (the longer the better) then it can be a quite lucrative as there have not been any full collections of first edition, first prints on the market. If they did come on the market the result would probably be in the tens of thousands.
Owning a Booker Prize-winning first edition allows you to secure a piece of cultural history at the exact moment a narrative transitioned from a standard release into a certified literary masterpiece. Because many earlier winners had incredibly modest initial print runs, tracking down a true first impression with an unclipped dust jacket offers a thrilling, high-stakes treasure hunt. Unlike mass-market fiction, a Booker victory creates an immediate and lasting spike in institutional demand, making these specific volumes highly resilient blue-chip assets in the antiquarian market. The official archive provides a ready-made, prestigious checklist that spans decades of diverse global voices, giving a personal library an instantly recognizable structure and elite status. Perhaps the ultimate triumph for any collector is identifying a brilliant novel on the longlist, securing a pristine copy for pocket money before the official announcement sends its market value soaring. Furthermore, these earliest editions capture a unique, unfiltered era of publishing design, preserving distinct cover art and typography that subsequent uniform paperbacks completely lose.
Tips For Buying Past & Future Booker Prize Winners
Always ask for an image of the copyright page if images don’t show it on a listing to make sure that you’re buying a first edition, first printing of the books’ year. Make sure the publisher is the correct one for the UK edition. American editions are likely to be published by another publisher.
The long list of about 13 books is usually announced around 4 months before the final winner is announced. That list is shortened to about 6 books 2 months prior to announcing the winner. Now is your chance to grab a Booker Prize winner before the winner is announced. Sometimes there are joint winners so you will already have the two winners if you purchase the shortlisted books. These can usually be picked up for a few pounds but as soon as the winner is announced you are talking hundreds of pounds. Many books that have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize go on to win other prizes which increases their resale value. The Whitbread Prize is one of them and The Nobel Prize of literature is another – so keep hold of those books. Once a book has been shortlisted for the prize, they usually increase in value just for being on the shortlist so you can sell them on for more than you paid if you’re savvy enough.
What Increases The Value Of Booker Prize Winners?
- First UK editions, first printings. Don’t settle for anything less. A UK edition will indicate where it was published, such as London, or Edinburgh for example. If it states somewhere in America for instance then it’s not a UK first edition.
- They must have the original dust jacket. The finer the condition of the dust jacket the better your collection will be. Sellers usually list the dust jacket as fine, near fine, very good, good, fair or poor. Dust jackets are just as important as the condition of the book. But if you have a fine dust jacket on a good condition book this can balance out the price.
- An uncorrected paperback proof edition can enhance the price especially if it is signed by the author.
- If you can afford it go for signed copies. There are many forged signatures out there so do your homework first. A good indication of a true signature is the bookshops sticker stating it is a signed copy.
- Having any special edition such as the added 1970 edition. (See the details in the fill list of Booker Prize winners below).
- You can have a mix of signed and unsigned as long as they are the first printings of the UK first edition. The more that are signed will increase the overall value of your collection. Signed is always better than inscribed, unless the inscription is to a notable person. A copy inscribed with just the owner’s name, Bill Botten and Salman Rushdie’s signature achieved £1,000 at Forum Auctions in November 2023.
How To Identify A First Edition First Printing Book
There are several ways to identify a first edition, first printing of a book. Firstly, look at the copyright page some actually have the words first edition, first printing. If it just states first edition look a little further down the page and you may see numbers usually from 10-1 or 1-10 sequence. If the number 1 is there it is a first print. If the lowest end number is 2 or 3 it is a second or third print.
Sometimes the copyright pages states first published in such a year with no numbers showing. Flip the page if there are no further details or numbers then it is a true first edition, first printing. The date must be the exact date at the first edition of the Booker Prize Winner so if a copy has a different date year or states First printed then has the words reprinted a few months later it is not a first print but is classed as first edition. If the copyright page states in association with another publisher like a Book Club, then this is not the true first edition.
Full List Of Booker Prize Winners
1969 Something to Answer For P. H. Newby, published in 1968 by Faber & Faber. A surreal, darkly comic story about an unreliable narrator losing his grip on reality during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
1970 The Elected Member Bernice Rubens, published in 1969 by Eyre & Spottiswoode. Blighted by imagined silverfish and crushing familial expectations, Norman Zweck’s descent into amphetamine psychosis brilliantly exposes how the suffocating bonds of a respectable home can serve as both a sanctuary and a cell.
1970 Troubles J. G. Farrell, published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape. A darkly comic and claustrophobic masterpiece that uses the slow, surreal decay of an eccentric Irish hotel as a haunting metaphor for the collapse of the British Empire.
(This title is known as The Lost Man Booker Prize Winner as a special edition due to a change in the rules which meant that a book had to be published in the previous year to be eligible to win the Booker prize. A new rule in 1971 brought about change.
1971 In a Free State V. S. Naipaul, published by Andre Deutsch. Is a haunting mosaic of displacement where the illusion of liberation constantly curdles into the quiet terror of alienation.
1972 G John Berger, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ‘G’ dismantles the traditional historical narrative by viewing the political upheavals of pre-World War I Europe through the kaleidoscopic lens of an enigmatic, sexually liberated protagonist.
1973 The Siege of Krishnapur J. G. Farrell, published in 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Amidst the absurdity of a collapsing empire, the story transforms a brutal historical rebellion into a darkly comedic melting pot where Victorian etiquette slowly dissolves into starvation and makeshift artillery fired from brass chandeliers.
1974 The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer, Published by Jonathan Cape. This haunting psychological chill over the decaying landscape of apartheid South Africa, where an affluent white industrialist’s desperate claim to the land is quietly unearthed by the unyielding presence of a dead man buried beneath its soil.
1974 Holiday Stanley Middleton, published in 1974 by Hutchinson. The story is of a man who quietly maps the vast, silent architecture of human grief alone on a fading English seaside.
(Note there were two joint winners in 1974).
1975 Heat and Dust Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, published in 1975 by John Murray. The mesmerising story that intertwines two parallel stories of English women seeking themselves across a scorching half-century in India.
1976 Saville David Storey, published in 1976 by Jonathan Cape. Is a sweeping, deeply immersive portrait of a coal miner’s son breaking away from the heavy, tight-knit traditions of a Yorkshire mining village.
1977 Staying On Paul Scott, published in 1977 by Heinemann. Turns the grans, fading sunset of the British Raj into a quiet, heartbreaking comedy of a forgotten elderly couple clinging to a small Indian hill station.
1978 The Sea, the Sea Iris Murdoch, published in 1978 by Chatto & Windus. A brilliant and unsettling study of ego, where a retired, self-absorbed theatre director retreats to a coastal house only to discover that the wild, indifferent sea mirrors the chaotic and destructive illusions of his own mind.
1979 Offshore Penelope Fitzgerald published in 1979 by Collins. This novel captures the precarious lives of a marginal community moored on the River Thames at Battersea Reach, floating in a state of in-between-ness where they belong neither to the solid ground of Chelsea nor to the open sea.
1980 Rites of Passage William Golding, published in 1980 by Faber & Faber. The ship in the novel becomes an inescapable, floating theatre of social cruelty, where class prejudices are weaponised to strip a man of his dignity until he literally dies of mortification.
1981 Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie, published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape. A man’s cracking physical body and telepathic mind act as a living historical record where the chaotic, magical birth of modern India is ground, seasoned, and swallowed whole like a spicy chutney.
1982 Schindler’s Ark Thomas Keneally, published in 1982 by Hodder & Stoughton. The story reveals how a flawed Nazi black-marketeer used the very machinery of his own exploitation to turn a munitions factory into an ark of salvation for more than 1,200 human lives.
1983 Life & Times of Michael K J. M. Coetzee, published in 1983 by Secker & Warburg. Set against a collapsing, bureaucratic South Africa, the novel follows a simple gardener with a harelip who escapes wartime internment camps not to fight, but to quietly cultivate pumpkin seeds in the dust, proving that absolute freedom can be found in absolute obscurity.
1984 Hotel du Lac Anita Brookner, published in 1984 by Jonathan Cape. Like the misty, still waters of its Swiss setting, the novel masterfully conceals a sharp undercurrent of irony, proving that a woman’s quiet withdrawal from society can be a far more powerful act of defiance than a loud confrontation.
1985 The Bone People Keri Hulme, published in 1985 by Hodder & Stoughton. Woven from the raw threads of Maori myth and fractured prose, the novel serves as a haunting crucible where three broken outcasts collide on the desolate New Zealand coastline, ultimately anchoring their shattered lives in a communal rebirth.
1986 The Old Devils Kingsley Amis, published in 1986 by Hutchinson. A brutally funny, hangover-soaked mirror to retirement, where a group of lifelong friends in Wales find that ageing doesn’t grant them wisdom, but rather a sharper wit and a shallower tolerance for each other’s eccentricities.
1987 Moon Tiger Penelope Lively, published in 1987 by Andre Deutsch. The novel uncoils like the green mosquito coil it is named after, layering Claudia Hampton’s fragmented, kaleidoscopic memories of wartime Cairo against the vast, uncaring backdrop of deep geological time.
1988 Oscar & Lucinda Peter Carey, published in 1988 by Faber & Faber. The novel reimagines nineteenth-century colonial Australia through a fever-dream lens of chance, where two eccentric misfits stake their sanity and a fragile glass church on a reckless roll of the theological dice.
1989 The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1989 by Faber & Faber. A devastating exercise in emotional archaeology, where an ageing butler’s impeccably polite recollections gradually fracture to reveal a lifetime of sacrificed intimacy and misplaced devotion to a disgraced master.
1990 Possession: A Romance A. S. Byatt, published in 1990 by Chatto & Windus. A literary detective story operates as a dazzling dual-timeline labyrinth, where the dry academic reality of two modern researchers beautifully collides with, and mirrors, the secret, passionate correspondence of the two Victorian poets they are obsessively tracking.
1991 The Famished Road Ben Okri, published in 1990 by Jonathan Cape. The novel seamlessly weaves a double-stranded helix of desire and intellect, where the meticulous puzzle-solving of contemporary scholars serves as both the map and the mirror to an illicit, long-buried Victorian love affair.
1992 The English Patient Michael Ondaatje, published in 1992 by Bloomsbury. A lyrical masterpiece acts as an elegant, smoke-filled desert mirage, where four fractured souls find refuge in a ruined Italian villa at the close of World War II, their lives irrevocably bound by the haunting, burned memories of a nameless cartographer’s tragic pre-war affair.
1992 Sacred Hunger Barry Unsworth, published in 1992 by Hamish Hamilton. An historical epic acts as a searing, dark-mirrored exploration of 18th-century human greed, charting the tragic voyage of a Liverpool slave ship where the brutal economics of the middle passage spark a desperate mutiny and a short-lived, fragile utopian settlement in the African wilderness.
(Note there were two joint winners in 1992).
1993 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Roddy Doyle, published in 1993 by Secker & Warberg. A bittersweet novel captures the fracturing universe of a boisterous ten-year-old Dublin boy, filtering the painful dissolution of his parents’ marriage through the hyperactive, playground-slang vocabulary of 1960s childhood innocence.
1994 How Late it Was, How Late James Kelman, published in 1994 by Secker & Warburg. The book forces the reader to experience a sightless world from the inside out, transforming a brutal street beating into a relentless, swear-laden jazz improvisation of survival against an indifferent city.
1995 The Ghost Road Pat Barker, published in 1995 by Viking. The novel unspools as a haunting danse macabre between British trench warfare and Melanesian ghost cults, where the final, mud-soaked days of World War I expose the shocking truth that Western civilisation’s ultimate achievement is a highly organised ritual of self-destruction.
1996 Last Orders Graham Swift, published in 1996 by Picador. The narrative unrolls like a smoke-tinged pub crawl down memory lane, where four working-class blokes transport a cardboard box of their mate’s cremated remains from South London to Margate Pier, their individual, overlapping monologues slowly piece together a mosaic of lifelong loyalties and quiet, devastating betrayals.
1997 The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy, published in 1997 by Flamingo. The prose functions as an architectural marvel of linguistic play and deep-seated grief, fracturing time to reveal how a single, forbidden moment of cross-caste passion can send ripples of structural violence through generations of a family, permanently dismantling the lives of its most vulnerable children.
1998 Amsterdam Ian McEwan, published in 1998 by Jonathan Cape. This razor-sharp satirical novel orchestrates a pitch-black comedy of elite manners, where a cynical composer and a self-serving newspaper editor strike a morbid, mutual euthanasia pact that inevitably devolves into a venomous, mutually assured destruction of their careers and psyches.
1999 Disgrace J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999 by Secker & Warburg. A sparse, unsparing masterpiece dissects the changing landscape of post-apartheid South Africa through the downfall of a disgraced Cape Town professor, who flees a scandal of his own making only to confront a brutal act of violence on his daughter’s remote farm that shatters his final remnants of romanticism and privilege.
2000 The Blind Assassin Margaret Attwood, published in 2000 by Bloomsbury. An intricate, multi-layered masterpiece functions as a literary Russian nesting doll, where an elderly woman’s dry recollections of a wealthy Canadian family’s ruin entwine with a scandalous, posthumously published romance and a pulp science-fiction allegory told by two illicit lovers in a darkened room.
2001 The History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey, published in 2001 by Faber & Faber. The narrative explodes off the page as an unedited, lawless stream of hyper-masculine vulnerability, re-engineering the classic bush ranger ballad into a visceral, blood-and-mud epic where a homemade suit of iron armour becomes the tragic shield for an inevitably doomed revolutionary.
2002 Life of Pi Yann Martel, published in 2002 by Canongate. A brilliantly inventive fable unfolds as a dazzling, sun-bleached optical illusion of survival, tracking an Indian teenager marooned on a solitary lifeboat in the vast Pacific Ocean with a ferocious, 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger as his terrifying companion and spiritual mirror.
2003 Vernon God Little D. B. C. Pierre, published in 2003 by Faber & Faber. A blistering, pitch-black satire captures the hyper-commercialised rot of the American dream through the profane, Texas-twanged narrative of a cynical fifteen-year-old boy who is scapegoated by media-crazed locals and a predatory opportunist for his best friend’s school shooting.
2004 The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst, published in 2004 by Picador. A pristine, decadent masterpiece dissects the intoxicating glitter and profound cruelty of Thatcherite London through the eyes of an aesthetic-obsessed gay Oxford graduate, who lodges within the opulent home of a Tory MP while floating through a hyper-stylised world of cocaine, high society, and the gathering, tragic shadow of the AIDS epidemic.
2005 The Sea John Banville, published in 2005 by Picador. exquisitely stylised, elegiac novel unfurls as a hypnotic, prose-poem study of grief and memory, tracking an ageing art historian who retreats to a faded seaside resort to mourn his late wife, only to find his mind pulled backward into the turbulent undercurrents of a single, intoxicating childhood summer defined by the seductive, tragic presence of an enigmatic affluent family.
2006 The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai, published in 2006 by Hamish Hamilton. A sweeping, melancholic masterpiece operates as a poignant, multi-generational mosaic of displacement, balancing the claustrophobic world of an embittered, Anglophile retired judge and his orphaned granddaughter in a crumbling Himalayan estate against the invisible, exhausting underground existence of their cook’s undocumented son working in New York City kitchens.
2007 The Gathering Anne Enright, published in 2007 by Jonathan Cape. A raw, unflinching novel operates as a stark, rhythmic autopsy of a fractured Dublin clan, where a grieving sister must navigate the alcohol-soaked wakes and buried childhood traumas of her large family after her beloved, troubled brother walks into the sea with pockets full of stones.
2008 The White Tiger Aravind Adiga, published in 2008 by Atlantic. A fast-paced, darkly comic debut unfolds as a series of cynical midnight letters from a self-made entrepreneur to the Chinese Premier, charting his ruthless, blood-soaked escape from the crushing poverty of “The Darkness” of rural India to the corrupt tech hubs of Bangalore by murdering his wealthy master.
2009 Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel, published in 2009 by Fourth Estate. A masterfully immersive historical epic completely strips away the dusty, costume-drama clichés of the Tudor court, filtering the high-stakes political chess match of Henry VIII’s break from Rome through the calculating, hyper-observant mind of Thomas Cromwell as he rises from a blacksmith’s abused son into the indispensable, shadow-weaving architect of an empire.
2010 The Finkler Question Howard Jacobson, published in 2010 by Bloomsbury. A razor-sharp, comic tragedy dissects modern British identity and antisemitism through the midlife crisis of an eccentric, non-Jewish radio producer who, after a bizarre street mugging, becomes obsessively consumed by a desire to reinvent himself as a Jew, viewing his friends’ complex cultural grief through a lens of profound envy.
2011 The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes, published in 2011 by Jonathan Cape. A sleek, psychological puzzle follows a retired, complacent Englishman whose tidy life is completely unmoored by an unexpected bequest, forcing him to reconstruct his student years and face the devastating, historic damage his own youthful arrogance and flawed memory inflicted on a brilliant friend.
2012 Bring up the Bodies Hilary Mantel, published in 2012 by Fourth Estate. A masterfully tense sequel operates as a claustrophobic political thriller, charting the breathless nine months in which Thomas Cromwell ruthlessly engineers the legal execution and total erasure of Queen Anne Boleyn to clear a path for Henry VIII’s next marriage.
2013 The Luminaries Eleanor Cattan, published in 2013 by Granta. The narrative functions as an ambitious literary kaleidoscope, where the dusty, mud-spattered realities of greed and murder in a rugged colonial mining town are meticulously organised by the elegant, invisible mathematics of the cosmos.
2014 The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan, published in 2014 by Chatto & Windus. A visceral, emotionally shattering epic unspools as a haunting meditation on memory and guilt, filtering the lifetime of a celebrated Australian surgeon through the crucible of his horrific experiences on the Burma Railway, where a desperate wartime love affair serves as his only internal shield against the brutal machinery of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
2015 A Brief History of Seven Killings Marlon James, published in 2014 by Oneworld. A polyphonic, cocaine-fuelled masterpiece explodes across three decades as an epic, language-shifting oral history, tracing the ripple effects of the real-life 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley through a chaotic chorus of Jamaican gang leaders, CIA operatives, ghost narrators, and drug kingpins.
2016 The Sellout Paul Beatty, published in 2016 by Oneworld. A blistering, satirical tour de force holds a fun house mirror to contemporary American race relations, charting the outrageous legal battle of an urban farmer who lands in the Supreme Court after attempting to reinstate segregation and slavery in a forgotten California suburb.
2017 Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders, published in 2017 by Bloomsbury. A polyphonic, genre-defying masterpiece orchestrates a kaleidoscopic, symphonic ghost story, weaving historical snippets with the theatrical chatter of eccentric, purgatorial spirits who watch a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln cradle the corpse of his eleven-year-old son in a moonlit cemetery.
2018 Milkman Anna Burns, published in 2018 by Faber & Faber. A hypnotic, claustrophobic novel captures the suffocating surveillance of through the stream-of-consciousness narrative of an unnamed eighteen-year-old girl, whose simple act of reading while walking makes her the target of malicious neighbourhood gossip and the unwanted, predatory advances of a high-ranking paramilitary figure.
2019 The Testaments Margaret Attwood, published in 2019 by Chatto & Windus. A high-stakes sequel acts as a fast-paced dystopian thriller that cracks open the inner workings of Gilead from three distinct perspectives, tracking the clandestine operations of the formidable Aunt Lydia alongside two young women as they orchestrate a dangerous plot to bring down the regime from within.
2019 Girl, Woman, Other Bernardine Evaristo, published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton. A vibrant, polyphonic masterpiece weaves together a fluid, “fusion fiction” tapestry of twelve interconnected, primarily Black British voices across generations, using an innovative, unpunctuated poetic prose to map a brilliant spectrum of identity, struggle, and joy.
(There were two joint winners in 2019).
2020 Shuggie Bain Douglas Stuart, published in 2020 by Picador. A devastating tender novel which unfolds as a heartbreak-soaked love letter to resilience, tracking a lonely, effeminate boy as he clings to his fierce loyalty towards his glamorous, fiercely alcoholic mother amidst the bleak, post-industrial ruins of 1980s public housing in Glasgow.
2021 The Promise Damon Galgut, published in 2021 by Chatto & Windus. A structurally brilliant novel charts the slow, decade-by-decade decay of a white South African family through four distinct funerals, with each death mirroring the nation’s political transition away from apartheid while highlighting the family’s failure to fulfil a simple deathbed vow made to their Black domestic worker.
2022 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida Shehan Karunatilaka, published in 2022 by Sort of Books. This supernatural satire unfolds as a frantic, afterlife detective thriller narrated by a dead war photographer who has exactly seven moons to navigate a bureaucratic celestial underworld, contact his loved ones, and expose a hidden cache of photos that could shatter the foundations of the Sri Lankan Civil War.
2023 Prophet Song Paul Lynch, published in 2023 by Oneworld. This terrifyingly plausible novel unfurls as a claustrophobic, breathless nightmare, trapping the reader inside an unpunctuated wall of prose as a Dublin mother fights to protect her four children after the Irish government rapidly slides into a totalitarian police state and her trade-unionist husband disappears into police
2024 Orbital Samantha Harvey, published in 2023 by Jonathan Cape. A lyrical, “space pastoral” masterpiece condenses the vastness of the cosmos into a plotless, 24-hour meditation, mapping 16 dizzying Earth orbits through the collective consciousness of six international astronauts who observe their borderless, fragile planet while navigating personal grief and the sublime infinitude of low Earth orbit.
2025 Flesh David Szalay, published in 2025 by Jonathan Cape. The novel reads as a cold, anatomical dissection of the modern human condition, where the protagonist’s trajectory from a rural conscript to an elite, global financier acts as a bleak parable for how raw, unchecked capitalism strips away everything but the primal urges of the body.
Disclaimer
All reviews and opinions on this blog are purely my own and are provided strictly for informational and entertainment purposes and not financial advice.