Steve McQueen, the visual artist and maker of three award-winning feature films, is to receive the British Film Institute’s highest accolade.

McQueen will become the youngest director to receive the BFI fellowship when it is presented to him at the awards ceremony of the London film festival on 15 October, six days after his 47th birthday.

McQueen, who won the Turner prize in 1999, has quickly established himself as one of the UK’s most respected film-makers responsible for Hunger (2008), Shame (2011) and the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013).

He joins a roll call of BFI fellows that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Elizabeth Taylor and Alec Guinness as well as directors Martin Scorsese, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Danny Boyle.

McQueen said it was an honour. “I first walked into the BFI library and cinema 28 years ago. To think that I will now be a fellow and honorary member, with such a distinguished list of people, is mind-blowing. I’m humbly honoured.”

Josh Berger, chair of the BFI, said the organisation was thrilled. “As winner of both the Turner prize and an academy award, Steve is pre-eminent in the world of film and the moving image.

“He is one of the most influential and important British artists of the past 25 years and his work, both short and long-form, has consistently explored the endurance of humanity ‐ even when it is confronted by inhumane cruelty ‐ with a poetry and visual style that he has made his own.”

The BFI fellowship, not to be confused with the Bafta fellowship – same idea, different organisations – was created in 1983 to mark the diamond jubilee of the BFI, Britain’s film agency. The first recipients were Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell, David Lean and Marcel Carné. Since then, more than 80 people have been made a fellow, names such as Derek Jarman, Ousmane Sembène and Clint Eastwood and, more recently, Hugh Grant in February, Cate Blanchett in 2015 and Al Pacino in 2014.

McQueen will be the youngest man, and youngest director, to receive the accolade although not quite the youngest recipient: the actor Helena Bonham Carter was 46 and five months when she received her fellowship in October 2012.

McQueen, who this year made an advert for Burberry, is working on a six-part BBC drama telling the stories of a West Indian community in west London from the late 1960s until the present.

He became the first, and still only, black director to win a best picture Oscar when 12 Years a Slave won in 2014, two years before this year’s #OscarsSoWhite row.

McQueen’s take on the issue was given in the Guardian in which he hoped “in 12 months or so we can look back and say this was a watershed moment, and thank God we put that right”.

But he said the awards were not where the real battle was: “One could talk about percentages of certain people who are Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] members and the demographics and so forth, but the real issue is movies being made. Decisions being made by heads of studios, TV companies and cable companies about what is and is not being made. That is the start. That is the root of the problem.”