Ranking the Booker
The Booker Prize has been awarded annually since 1969, producing over 50 winners. But not all Booker winners are equal — some have become permanent fixtures of the literary canon, while others have faded from public memory. Using our editorial scoring system, which aggregates appearances across major prize lists, critical surveys, and cultural institutions, we rank every Booker winner by sustained critical reputation.
Tier 1 — The Enduring Masterpieces
1. Midnight's Children — Salman Rushdie (1981)
The most critically acclaimed Booker winner of all time. Won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008). Rushdie's postcolonial magical realist epic about Indian independence is the most decorated English-language novel of the last fifty years. Aggregate editorial score: 100.
2. Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel (2009)
Mantel's reinvention of the historical novel — and her unprecedented back-to-back wins with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) — secured her place as the most important English historical novelist since Walter Scott.
3. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
Ishiguro's butler novel is the Booker winner most often cited as a "perfect novel." The restraint, the emotional precision, and the devastating final pages make it the most widely recommended literary novel in English. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017.
4. The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje (1992)
Joint winner with Sacred Hunger. Ondaatje's novel of four lives converging in a bomb-damaged Italian villa is one of the most beautifully written Booker winners.
5. Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee (1999)
Coetzee's second Booker win — the only author to win twice before Mantel. His novel of reckoning in post-apartheid South Africa is the most morally challenging Booker winner. Nobel Prize in Literature, 2003.
Tier 2 — Major Achievements
6. The God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy (1997)
Roy's debut is the most lyrically beautiful Booker winner — the prose itself is an event. The novel's treatment of caste, forbidden love, and childhood in Kerala earned it both the Booker and global bestseller status.
7. Life of Pi — Yann Martel (2002)
The most commercially successful Booker winner of the 2000s. Martel's adventure-philosophy hybrid — a boy and a tiger on a lifeboat — has been translated into over 40 languages.
8. Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders (2017)
The most formally experimental Booker winner of the modern era. Saunders's polyphonic ghost story proved that radical formal innovation could win the most mainstream literary prize.
9. The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton (2013)
Catton became the youngest Booker winner at 28. Her 832-page novel — structured around the zodiac — is the most architecturally ambitious Booker winner.
10. Shuggie Bain — Douglas Stuart (2020)
Stuart's debut about a boy and his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow was rejected by over 30 publishers. Its Booker win is one of the great redemption stories of modern publishing.
Tier 3 — Strong Winners
The next tier includes A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2015), The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000), True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001), The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991), and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998) — though McEwan's win is widely considered among the weakest in the prize's history.
Recent Winners (2020–2024)
Shuggie Bain (2020), The Promise by Damon Galgut (2021), The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (2022), Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023), and Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2024). The recent trend is toward politically engaged, formally adventurous fiction — suggesting the Booker is in a strong period.
How to Use This Ranking
Start with Tier 1 — any of the top five Booker winners will reward your time. If you want accessibility, begin with The Remains of the Day. If you want ambition, begin with Midnight's Children. If you want a recent winner, Shuggie Bain is exceptional.
