Who was the first woman to win the Booker Prize?

Bernice Rubens was the first woman to win the Booker Prize, taking the 1970 award for her novel The Elected Member. The victory came in only the second year of the prize, which was established in 1969.

Rubens was a Welsh novelist born in Cardiff. The Elected Member is a psychologically intense family story about a successful Jewish family whose son becomes addicted to drugs and suffers a breakdown. Its focus on private anguish and family relationships helped establish Rubens as a distinctive literary voice, quite different from the more publicly political fiction often associated with the Booker.

Several later female winners are commonly mistaken for the first. Penelope Fitzgerald won in 1979 for Offshore, while A. S. Byatt won in 1990 for Possession. Margaret Atwood has been shortlisted several times and won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, but she was not the first woman winner.

Rubens remained the only Welsh author to win the Booker Prize for many years, adding a national distinction to her place in the award’s history.