Which Salman Rushdie novel won the Booker Prize in 1981?

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981.

The novel follows Saleem Sinai, who is born at the exact moment India becomes independent in 1947. Saleem and the other children born in that midnight hour develop extraordinary abilities, linking their personal lives to the political creation, partition, and later history of modern India.

Published by Jonathan Cape in 1981, the book combines magical realism, historical fiction, and a self-conscious narrative voice. Rushdie uses Saleem’s unreliable storytelling to explore how private memory and national history can distort, echo, and rewrite one another.

The title can cause confusion because Rushdie won several major honors for the same novel. Midnight’s Children received the Booker Prize in 1981, later won the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and was voted the Best of the Booker in 2008. Shame, another Rushdie novel, was shortlisted for the Booker but did not win it.