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I WAS delighted with last week’s ruleflouting announcement that the 2019 Booker Prize would be shared by Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. I am inspired by how supportive both are of other authors, especially those just starting out. These are women who lean in.

Evaristo, who last week became the first black woman to win the Booker, was among the first authors I invited to the 2019 Greenwich Book Festival, which I founded.

She was raised in South-East London in an era when most people’s idea of an author was pale, male and probably posh. As an author, editor and professor of creative writing, she has helped expand the cultural horizons of British bookshelves.

‘What does it mean to not see yourself reflected in your nation’s stories?’ she has written.

‘We black British women know that if we don’t write ourselves into literature no one else will.’

So, her Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other celebrates the lives of 12, mostly black, British women. These include Amma, a once-radical fringe playwright now opening a play at the National Theatre; nonagenarian farmer Hattie; city highflyer Carole; Shirley, the secondary teacher who pressured Carole to fulfil her academic promise and the latter two’s immigrant mothers. It is a joyous snapshot of multiple lives.

Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, also puts female power to the fore. Set 15 years after Offred’s story ended on a cliffhanger, it tells what happened next from the perspective of two women (one brought up under the repressive theocracy of Gilead; one among liberal escapees to neighbouring Canada). Even before winning the Booker, Atwood’s book was a bestselling literary phenomenon.

Released in the summer, Victoria Hislop’s latest novel, Those Who Are Loved tells the history of a modern Greece through the reflections of nonagenarian Themis, resourceful and resilient survivor of earthquake, occupation, civil war, dictatorship, political imprisonment, heartbreak and bereavement.

Take some time to get to know these redoubtable fictional women.