Authors share Booker Prize

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and British author Bernardine Evaristo split the Booker Prize on Monday, after the judging panel ripped up the rulebook and refused to name one winner for the prestigious fiction trophy.

Chairman Peter Florence said the five judges simply couldn’t choose between Atwood’s dystopian thriller “The Testaments” and Evaristo’s kaleidoscope of black women’s stories, “Girl, Woman, Other.”

Partly inspired by the environmental protesters of Extinction Rebellion, who were demonstrating near the prize ceremony’s venue in London’s financial district, Florence said, the judges refused to back down when told the rules prohibit more than one winner.

“Our consensus was that it was our decision to flout the rules,” he said. “I think laws are inviolable and rules are adaptable to the circumstance.”

Prize organizers didn’t see it that way. Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said prize trustees repeatedly told the judges they couldn’t have two winners, but they “essentially staged a sit-in in the judging room” as deliberations dragged on for five hours.

Wood insisted the decision “doesn’t set a precedent.” It means Atwood and Evaristo will split the 50,000-pound ($63,000) Booker Prize purse.

Both winners said they were happy to share the prize.

“It would have been quite embarrassing for a person of my age and stage to have won the whole thing and thereby have kept a younger one, at different stage of their career, from going through that door,” said Atwood, who at 79 is the oldest-ever Booker winner.

Evaristo said winning the Booker was something that “felt so unattainable for decades.”

“So I’m just absolutely delighted to have the prize and to share the prize,” she said.

Atwood, who won the Booker in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin,” had been the bookmakers’ favorite to win the coveted trophy for a second time with her follow-up to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Like that book — now a hit TV series — “The Testaments” is set in Gilead, a theocratic republic taken root in the United States, where young women are forced to bear children for powerful men.

Evaristo, who is of Anglo-nigerian heritage, is the first black woman to take the trophy.

Tolga Akmen / AFP / Getty Images Authors Margaret Atwood, left, and Bernardine Evaristo will share the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction. The competition’s judges couldn’t choose between Atwood’s “The Testaments” and Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” forcing the foundation to split the honor and $63,000 purse.