If the Booker Prize had begun in 1900 - rather than in 1969 - who would have won each year? This is a provisional set of answers: if you have better suggestions, please email us, or tweet us using the hashtag #Booker1900. (Years where the winner seems particularly unlikely we have marked with a bold exclamation mark: [!]) We will revisit this list periodically. We've decided to go with the post-2013 Booker rules, so any English-language novel is eligible. There's a slight bias towards not giving the prize to the same author too quickly after a victory, but Hilary Mantel's astonishing double Booker is pipped substantially here by Woolf's and Wharton's runs. Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing both manage the impressive trick of winning the Booker for their debuts. Graham Greene wins the Bad Luck Booker award, for publishing all his best books in the same year as better books by different authors. It was still definitely a wrench to award the 1955 Booker to Lolita over The Quiet American. And who knows what the 1933 judges were thinking.
1900 Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
1901 Kim, Rudyard Kipling
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle [!]
1903 The Ambassadors, Henry James
1904 The Golden Bowl, Henry James
1905 The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
1906 The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
1907 The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
1908 A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
1909 Tono-Bungay, H.G. Wells
1910 Howard's End, E.M. Forster
1911 Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
1912 Mrs. Ames, E.F. Benson [!]
1913 The Village in the Jungle, Leonard Woolf
1914 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell [!]
1915 The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
1917 Summer, Edith Wharton [!]
1918 My Antonia, Willa Cather
1919 The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham
1920 The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
1921 [NO AWARD]
1922 Ulysses, James Joyce
1923 Kangaroo, D.H. Lawrence [!]
1924 A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
1925 Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
1926 Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
1927 Mr. Fortune's Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner
1928 Orlando, Virginia Woolf
1929 A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
1930 The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
1931 The Waves, Virginia Woolf
1932 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1933 Lost Horizon, James Hilton [!]
1934 Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
1935 Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood
1936 Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
1937 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Winifred Watson
1938 The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
1939 Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
1940 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
1941 Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf
1942 Put Out More Flags, Evelyn Waugh [!]
1943 The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene [!]
1944 Dangling Man, Saul Bellow
1945 The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
1946 Delta Wedding, Eudora Welty
1947 The Pearl, John Steinbeck
1948 The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner
1949 Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
1950 The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing
1951 The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
1952 Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
1953 The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
1954 My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Amos Tutola
1955 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
1956 Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
1957 Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame
1958 Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
1959 The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler
1960 The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark
1961 Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
1962 The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
1963 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John Le Carre
1964 Herzog, Saul Bellow
1965 The British Museum Is Falling Down, David Lodge
1966 Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
1967 The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien
1968 A Small Town in Germany, John Le Carre [!]
