1969 P.H. Newby's Something to Answer For wins the first Booker-McConnell Prize. Aiming to reward the best novel of the year by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, it is dreamed up by Tom Maschler, a celebrated publisher at Jonathan Cape. Inspired by the French Prix Goncourt, Maschler approached the Booker Brothers food wholesalers, who also had a profitable 'authors' division' that published writers including Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley and Harold Pinter.
1970 Bernice Rubens is the first female winner, for The Elected Member.
1974 The first tie, between Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton's Holiday. The only other dead-heat is in 1992, between Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.
1981 Salman Rushdie (above) wins for Midnight's Children. In 1993, to mark the prize's 25th anniversary, the novel is selected as the 'Booker of Bookers'.
1982 Thomas Keneally wins with Schindler's Ark.
1989 John Banville is shortlisted for The Body of Evidence. The prize goes to Kazuo Ishiguro for The Remains of the Day.
1992 A Russian version of the prize, called the Booker-Open Russia Literary Prize, is created. The first winner is Mark Kharitonov's Lines of Fate. He wins US$12,500.