British · b. 1949
Graham Swift won the 1996 Booker Prize for "Last Orders," a novel about friends carrying a man's ashes to scatter at sea, told through multiple voices. The British author has been shortlisted for the Booker three times—including for "Waterland," his masterful meditation on history and the Fens. Swift writes about English working-class and lower-middle-class lives with attention to how the past haunts the present.