McEwan collected a 33,000 dollars cheque at the 1998 awards ceremony in London's Guildhall yesterday.

Amsterdam tells the story of two men embroiled in scandal when the lover of both is photographed in compromising positions with the foreign secretary.

``I feel as if I'm in a dream as I'm sure all winners before me have felt too,'' the author said as he received his award from former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd. It was McEwan's third nomination.

A Booker prize can more than double hardback sales and has greatly boosted library readership of winning books.

The prize, established in 1968, is bestowed each year on the best novel written in English in Britain or in the Commonwealth nations.

The bookmakers' favorite to win had been Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie set in the backdrop Crimean War. Bainbridge has been nominated five times for the Booker.

Other nominees wereJulian Barnes' satire England, England, Patrick McCabe's Breakfast On Pluto about an Irish transvestite during the 1970s Northern Ireland troubles, The Restraint of Beasts -- debut novel of bus driver Magnus Mills -- about two Scot fence builders, and Martin Booth's The Industry Of Souls about a man imprisoned as a spy for 20 years in a Soviet labour camp.