# The Best Booker Prize Winners of the Last Decade (2015-2024)

> From Marlon James's Jamaica to Samantha Harvey's space station, the ten novels that won fiction's most argued-over prize between 2015 and 2024 — and why each one still matters.

*Published 2026-07-10 · By James Whitfield*

Since 1969, the Booker Prize has been the single most argued-about award in English-language fiction — a £50,000 prize, decided by a five-person panel that changes every year, for the best novel published in the UK or Ireland. No decade tested that formula more than the last one. Between 2015 and 2024 the prize survived a bitterly contested eligibility change, judges who broke their own rules to avoid picking a loser, and a run of winners that ranged from a 700-page Jamaican epic to a 136-page novel set on the International Space Station. Here is every winner of that decade, in order, with the context that explains why each one still gets talked about.
In short
The ten Booker Prize winners between 2015 and 2024 span a first Jamaican winner (Marlon James, 2015), the first two American winners after a controversial 2014 eligibility change (Paul Beatty, George Saunders), a rule-breaking split decision (Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, 2019), and the shortest, first space-set winner in the prize's history (Samantha Harvey's *Orbital*, 2024). Full details are on [the Booker Prizes' official winners list](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/full-list-of-booker-prize-winners-shortlisted-and-longlisted-authors).

## Which novels won the Booker Prize from 2015 to 2024?

The table below lists every winner across the decade, in order, with the detail that made the judges' decision notable that year.
Booker Prize winners, 2015-2024YearTitleAuthorWhy it mattered2015A Brief History of Seven KillingsMarlon JamesFirst Jamaican winner; a 700-page, multi-narrator novel built around the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley.2016The SelloutPaul BeattyFirst American winner after the 2014 eligibility change; a satire on race and segregation in Los Angeles.2017Lincoln in the BardoGeorge SaundersSecond American winner; an experimental chorus of ghost-narrators set in a Georgetown cemetery in 1862.2018MilkmanAnna BurnsFirst Northern Irish winner; an unnamed narrator's stream-of-consciousness account of life during the Troubles.2019Girl, Woman, Other / The TestamentsBernardine Evaristo & Margaret AtwoodJudges broke the no-tie rule to split the prize; Evaristo became the first Black woman to win.2020Shuggie BainDouglas StuartA debut novel; a working-class Glasgow childhood shadowed by poverty and a mother's addiction.2021The PromiseDamon GalgutWon on his third shortlisting; a multigenerational saga of a white South African family and a broken promise.2022The Seven Moons of Maali AlmeidaShehan KarunatilakaSecond Sri Lankan winner; a satirical afterlife murder mystery set during the country's civil war.2023Prophet SongPaul LynchFifth Irish winner; a dystopian portrait of a family's collapse under a fictional totalitarian Ireland.2024OrbitalSamantha HarveyFirst space-set winner and, at 136 pages, one of the shortest ever; first woman to win since 2019.
## How did the 2014 eligibility change reshape the Booker Prize?

Before 2014, the Booker Prize was restricted to citizens of the Commonwealth, Ireland, and Zimbabwe — a rule meant to keep the award distinct from American literary culture. In 2014 the prize's trustees widened eligibility to any novel originally written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, regardless of the author's nationality. British publishers and authors, including past winners, warned that better-funded American publishing houses would crowd Commonwealth and Irish writers off future shortlists. The first two winners under the new rule proved the anxiety was not baseless: **Paul Beatty** won in 2016 for *The Sellout*, becoming the first American to take the prize, and **George Saunders** followed in 2017 for *Lincoln in the Bardo*. Both books are formally daring — Beatty's is a profane, unrelenting satire of American racial politics narrated by a Black man who reinstitutes segregation in his Los Angeles neighborhood, while Saunders' novel unfolds as a chorus of ghost-voices haunting a Georgetown cemetery the night Abraham Lincoln's young son was buried. The rule survived the criticism, and non-American, non-British writers still won six of the next eight prizes, including Marlon James, Anna Burns, Damon Galgut, Shehan Karunatilaka, and Paul Lynch.

## Which Booker Prize winners from the decade broke the most new ground?

Several of the decade's winners are remembered as much for what they represented as for the books themselves. Marlon James's 2015 win for *A Brief History of Seven Killings* made him the first Jamaican author to take the prize, for a sprawling novel narrated by dozens of voices circling the real 1976 attempt on Bob Marley's life. Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win in 2018 with *Milkman*, a novel so committed to its unnamed-narrator conceit that none of its characters — not the city, not the paramilitaries, not the "milkman" of the title — are ever named outright. The most contested moment came in 2019, when judges could not settle between Bernardine Evaristo's *Girl, Woman, Other* and Margaret Atwood's *The Testaments* and, after roughly five hours of deliberation, chose to defy the prize's explicit no-tie rule and split it — a decision that made Evaristo the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize, but that critics called an abdication of the judges' actual job. Shehan Karunatilaka's 2022 win for *The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida*, a satirical murder mystery narrated from the afterlife during Sri Lanka's civil war, made him only the second Sri Lankan-linked winner after Michael Ondaatje's shared 1992 prize. And Samantha Harvey's 2024 win for *Orbital* — a single day aboard the International Space Station, told in 136 pages — gave the prize its first space-set winner and one of its shortest ever, according to [the Booker Prizes' own announcement](https://thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-the-booker-prize-2024).

## Where should a new reader start with the decade's Booker Prize winners?

Readers intimidated by experimental structure should start with the decade's two most conventionally narrated winners: Douglas Stuart's *Shuggie Bain* (2020), a devastating, linear account of a boy's childhood in 1980s Glasgow shadowed by his mother's alcoholism, and Paul Lynch's *Prophet Song* (2023), which [The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/26/paul-lynch-prophet-song-booker-prize/) described as reading almost like a thriller as it tracks one Dublin family's unraveling under a fictional authoritarian government. Readers ready for more structural ambition should move to Damon Galgut's *The Promise* (2021), which shifts perspective within single paragraphs to track a South African family's decades-long failure to honor a promise made to a Black domestic worker, or to Shehan Karunatilaka's darkly comic *The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida* (2022). The decade's most demanding winners — Marlon James's multi-narrator *A Brief History of Seven Killings*, Anna Burns's unnamed-everything *Milkman*, and Bernardine Evaristo's polyphonic *Girl, Woman, Other* — reward patience with some of the most formally inventive fiction the prize has ever honored.

## What ties the decade's Booker Prize winners together?

Read together, the ten winners from 2015 to 2024 do not share a genre or a nationality so much as a willingness to bend the conventional novel's shape to fit an unconventional subject: a reggae star's near-assassination, a segregationist satire, a ghost-choir at a graveside, an unnamed city under occupation, a space station in real time. The Booker Prize's judging panel changes every year by design, which is precisely why the last decade's winners refuse to add up to a single house style — and why the prize remains the most reliable single-book-a-year reading list in English-language fiction.

## Sources

1. [Full list of Booker Prize winners, shortlisted and longlisted authors and their books](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/full-list-of-booker-prize-winners-shortlisted-and-longlisted-authors)
2. [Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins the Booker Prize 2024](https://thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-the-booker-prize-2024)
3. [Prophet Song, Paul Lynch's 'triumph of emotional storytelling' wins the Booker Prize 2023](https://thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/prophet-song-paul-lynch-wins-booker-prize-2023)
4. [Shuggie Bain wins 2020 Booker Prize](https://thebookerprizes.com/media-centre/press-releases/shuggie-bain-wins-2020-booker-prize)
5. [The Booker Prize 2019](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2019)
6. ['Prophet Song' by Paul Lynch wins the 2023 Booker Prize](https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/26/paul-lynch-prophet-song-booker-prize/)
7. [List of winners and nominated authors of the Booker Prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winners_and_nominated_authors_of_the_Booker_Prize)

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Source: https://bookserif.com/reading-lists/best-booker-prize-winners-decade
Index: https://bookserif.com/llms.txt · Full text: https://bookserif.com/llms-full.txt