Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie in running for Booker Prize
LONDON — Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Testaments,” the highly anticipated sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” was announced here on Wednesday as one of the books in the running for the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award.
“A ferocious nondisclosure agreement” prevented the prize’s judges revealing any of the book’s plot, they said in a joint statement announcing the list of 13 competitors. But the novel is “terrifying and exhilarating,” they added.
Atwood, whose novel “The Blind Assassin” won the Booker Prize in 2000, faces strong competition for the award. Other nominated books include Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming “Quichotte,” about a travelling salesman who drives across the United States, and “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World” by Elif Shafak, about a prostitute in Istanbul.
Little is known about “The Testaments,” except that it is set 15 years after “The Handmaid’s Tale” and is narrated by three female characters. Last year, Atwood said in a statement that she wanted “The Testaments” to explore parallels between her imaginary dystopia — in which women are treated as reproductive serfs — and the current political climate.
The list of nominees is dominated by novels inspired by political crises, such as John Lanchester’s “The Wall,” set on an island surrounded by a concrete barrier to keep rising seas and immigrants out. Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s “Lost Children Archive,” about child migrants, has also made the cut. “The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity,” wrote Gaiutra Bahadur, in a review of the book for The New York Times.
The nominated books “imagine our world, familiar from news cycle disaster and grievance, with wild humour, deep insight and a keen humanity,” said Peter Florence, the chair of the judges, in a statement.
Other books on the list are less political, such as Oyinkan Braithwaite’s comic thriller, “My Sister, The Serial Killer,” about two siblings in Lagos, Nigeria, one of whom has a habit of murdering her boyfriends. It is “a bombshell of a book — sharp, explosive, hilarious,” wrote Fiammetta Rocco in The New York Times.
From its inception in 1969 until 2014, the Booker prize was limited to books by writers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries (plus South Africa and, later, Zimbabwe), but that changed in 2014, when it was opened to works by anyone writing in English. That led to fears it would be dominated by Americans.
In 2016, Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout” took the prize, and, the following year, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders, won. Both writers are American. After that, criticism of the rule change grew, and non-American authors complained they were being crowded out. In 2018, a literary society that includes Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith demanded the rule be reversed.
The shortlist of six nominees will be revealed Sept. 3, and the winner, who receives around $62,000, will be announced in London Oct. 14.