Annal:1981 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 1981. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1981 Booker winner
- 1981 JT Black-Fiction winner
- Score: 20.31
In the moments of upheaval that surround the stroke of midnight on August 14—15, 1947, the day India proclaimed its independence from Great Britain, 1,001 children are born—each of whom is gifted with supernatural powers. Midnight’s Children focuses on the fates of two of them—the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the male heir of a wealthy Muslim family—who become inextricably linked when a midwife switches the boys at birth.
An allegory of modern India, Midnight’s Children is a family saga set against the volatile events of the thirty…
- 1981 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.31
As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though someone is waiting for them who cares deeply about how they appear. When they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell, they become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.
- 1981 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.31
The Sirian Experiments is the third volume in Doris Lessing’s celebrated space fiction series. “Canopus in Argos: Archives”. In this interlnked quintet of novels, she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing’s astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic…
- 1981 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.31
Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, the large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy, and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behavior. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.
This elegant and allusive novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.
- 1981 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.31
“How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,” Fleur Talbot rejoices. Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world,” as secretary to the peculiar Autobiographial Association. Mad egomaniacs, hilariously writing their memoirs in advance—or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? Rich material, in any case. But when its pompous director, Sir Quentin Oliver, steals the manuscript of Fleur’s new novel, fiction begins to appropriate life. The…
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 WFA–Novel nominee
- 1981 Booker shortlist
- Score: 22.31
By turns a dream of electrifying eroticism recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud, and a horrifying yet calmly unsensational narrative of the Holocaust, this PEN Silver Pen winner is now recognized as a modern classic that reconciles the nightmarish with the transcendent.
