AUTHORS SHARE BOOKER PRIZE
THE Booker Prize was announced on Monday night and, in a departure from its rules, it was shared by Margaret Atwood, for The Testaments, and Bernardine Evaristo, for Girl, Woman, Other.
“We were told quite firmly that the rules state you can only have one winner,” Peter Florence, the chairperson of the Booker judges, said.
But the “consensus was to flout the rules and divide this year’s prize to celebrate two winners”.
British author Evaristo also made history by being the first black woman to receive the prize in its 51 years.
“I hope that honour doesn’t last too long,” she said in her acceptance speech.
Her eighth book, Girl, Woman,
Other, follows the intertwining stories of 12 characters: mostly women, black and British.
On sharing the prize, she said she was “absolutely delighted to share it with the legend that is Margaret Atwood”.
The Testaments, the anticipated sequel to her 1985 dystopian thriller,
The Handmaid’s Tale, is Canadian Atwood’s 18th novel. With her win, she becomes the fourth author to garner the Booker twice. Atwood’s first Booker was in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.
Through the revealing testaments of three women, Atwood lifts the lid on the inner-workings of the patriarchal state of Gilead, and answers questions that for decades tantalised readers since The Handmaid’s Tale.
The judging panel, Florence, Liz Calder, Xiaolu Guo, Afua Hirsch and Joanna MacGregor, said The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other “address the world today and give us insights into it and create characters who resonate with us, and will resonate with us for ages”.
The shortlist included Salman Rushdie for Quichotte, Elif Shafak for
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, Lucy Ellmann for Ducks, Newburyport, and Chigozie Obioma for An Orchestra of Minorities. This is not the first time the award has been shared.
In 1992, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, shared the award, but organisers then altered the rules to only allow only one winner to avoid undermining either book.