The high-profile female winners of the Booker Prize

Margaret Atwood, pictured, won the Booker Prize for The Testaments (Ian West/PA) - (PA Archive)

Samantha Harvey has become the first woman since 2019 to win the Booker Prize with Orbital, in a record year for female writers.

According to the Booker Prize, 36 men and 19 women have won it since its inception.

This year, five women were shortlisted for the prize for the first time in its history. Here, the PA news agency looks back on the biggest female writers to have snapped up the prestigious literary award.

The Queen with 2019 Booker Prize winners Bernardine Evaristo (left) and Margaret Atwood (right) (Aaron Chown/PA) (PA Archive)

A double-winner controversy

In 2019, the judges rebelled against the rules and gave both Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and British author Bernardine Evaristo the gong amid difficulties choosing between their novels The Testaments, and Girl, Woman, Other.

Atwood had been shortlisted several times, including in 1986 for The Handmaid’s Tale, and her 10th novel, The Blind Assassin, won the prize in 2000.

Evaristo recently saw her book Mr Loverman turned into a BBC drama, while Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was turned into a popular Hulu series fronted by Elisabeth Moss.

Dame Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (Ian West/PA) (PA Archive)

Dame Hilary Mantel

Hailed as one of the greatest writers of historical fiction, Dame Hilary immersed a generation of readers in the turbulent and cut-throat world of Henry VIII’s court through the Wolf Hall trilogy.

Her tale of Thomas Cromwell’s rise won the 2009 Booker Prize, as did its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, and was made into a popular BBC series starring Sir Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damian Lewis as Henry VIII.

A follow-up, The Mirror And The Light, was published in 2020 and has been made into the final BBC series, which began airing earlier this month. She died in 2022.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (PA Media) (PA Media)

AS ByattDame Antonia Byatt, known as AS Byatt, won the 1990 Booker Prize for romance novel Possession, and in 2009 was shortlisted for the prize for The Children’s Book.

The book was adapted for a 2002 romance mystery movie of the same name starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Toby Stephens and Tom Hollander.

Iris Murdoch

Dame Iris Murdoch, played by Dame Judi Dench in a 2001 biopic that delved into her life and battle with Alzheimer’s disease, was a philosopher and writer who was born in Dublin.

The Sea, The Sea, about an egotistical central character, won the 1978 Booker Prize, and she was nominated several more times for the prize.