Booker Prize 1988: Complete list of winners

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda claimed the Booker Prize in 1988, a win that felt both inevitable and surprising in equal measure. The novel, a sprawling Victorian epic set partly in Australia, showcased Carey’s distinctive ability to blend historical fiction with magical realism, telling the story of two damaged souls bound together by a wager involving glass. At a time when the Booker Prize—Britain’s most prestigious literary award—often celebrated introspective British fiction, Carey’s exuberant, geographically expansive novel represented a quiet shift in how the judges valued ambition and imagination over conventional restraint.

The 1988 Booker Prize win marked a turning point for Australian literature on the international stage. While the award, officially known as the Booker Prize for Fiction, had previously crowned worthy English and Commonwealth voices, Carey’s victory suggested that the judges were increasingly willing to look beyond the usual suspects and embrace writers whose sensibilities felt genuinely contemporary and cross-cultural. Oscar and Lucinda wasn’t a quiet novel of manners or a modest character study—it was audacious, playful, and unafraid to ask its reader to surrender to its baroque pleasures, qualities that would come to define much of Carey’s career.

Below, you’ll find the complete details of the 1988 Booker Prize winner and the year’s shortlist.

Fiction

• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey