Winners

What Shaped 1972

Berger used his Booker acceptance speech to attack the sponsor's origins in Caribbean plantation labour and gave half the prize money to the British Black Panthers, which remains the most confrontational thing anyone has done with a literary award. Böll's Nobel honoured a writer who had spent his career examining what ordinary Germans had done and failed to do. Burglars were arrested at the Watergate in June, Nixon went to China in February, and eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics.

Published in 1972, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1972 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

    Marco Polo describes fifty five imagined cities, each given a woman's name, to an aging Kublai Khan, who is trying, through these reports, to...

  • No major prize
    Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

    An unnamed narrator, an illustrator, returns from Toronto to the remote Quebec island where she grew up, searching for her father, who has vanished...

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