US-born Canadian author Carol Shields' novel The Republic of Love is set in her home town of Winnipeg

All the Pretty Horses is the first volume of US author Cormac McCarthy's trilogy set in Mexico

English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set partly in the trenches of World War I

US author Annie Proulx wins major awards with her second novel, The Shipping News

Vikram Seth publishes his novel A Suitable Boy, a family saga in post-independence India

Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes his first novel, Trainspotting

Irish author Roddy Doyle publishes a novel that wins the Booker Prize, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia

Quentin Tarantino directs John Travolta and Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction

A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Indian author Arundhati Roy publishes her first novel, The God of Small Things

The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials

In his novel Atonement Ian McEwan follows the disasters resulting from a child's mistaken identity of a supposed rapist , through to the child's attempt, more than sixty years later, at atonement

InAusterlitz W.G. Sebald follows the painful quest of a Czech Jew, brought to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport, to discover the history of his immediate family

Laure Prouvost, a French artist working in London, wins the Turner Prize with her work Wantee, evoking a fictional relationship between her grandfather and Kurt Schwitters