Booker Prize 2019: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo win joint award as jury break the rules
Authors split £50,000 prize after panel ignores rule prohibiting joint winners
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Your support makes all the difference.Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been announced as the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize in a historic, rule-defying judgement.
The announcement was made at a ceremony at London’s Guildhall, broadcast live on the BBC. Atwood won for The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, while Evaristo won for her novel Girl, Woman, Other.
The Testaments, which became the fastest-selling hardback novel in four years on its publication in September, is set 15 years after the final scene of The Handmaid’s Tale. The first book was adapted for a film starring Natasha Richardson in 1990 and is currently the basis for the Bafta-winning TV series starring Elisabeth Moss. The Independent deemed it an ”addictively readable, fast-paced adventure about the collapse of Gilead”.
Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s eighth book of fiction. It tells the stories of 12 characters, mostly black British women. The novel was hailed by Stylist as “exceptional” and “ambitious” and described by the New Statesman as ”a story for our times”.
It’s the third time the Booker Prize has gone to two joint winners. The first instance was in 1974, when it went to to Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton. The most recent case came in 1992, when Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth were both announced as winners. A change in rules allowed only one author to win the prize from 1993 on, but the judges decided to ignore that change when time came to pick the winners of the 2019 decision.
“Over an agonising five hours, the 2019 Booker Prize judges discussed all of the much-loved books on their shortlist, and found it impossible to single out one winner,” said Gaby Wood, the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation.
“They were not so much divided as unwilling to jettison any more when they finally got down to two, and asked if they might split the prize between them. On being told that it was definitively against the rules, the judges held a further discussion and chose to flout them.
“They left the judging room happy and proud, their twin winners gesturing towards the six they would have wanted, had it been possible to split the prize any further.”
Atwood and Evaristo will split the £50,000 prize money.
Evaristo is the first black woman to receive the Booker Prize since its creation in 1969.
Atwood is the fourth author to have won it twice, and The Testaments is the third sequel to have emerged as a winner.
Salman Rushdie, who was among the shortlisted authors for 2019, was one of this year’s frontrunners for Quichotte.
He and Atwood have both won the coveted literary prize before, in 2000 and 1981 respectively. Atwood also made the shortlist with The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986, and again in 1989, 1996 and 2003.
Last year’s award was given to Belfast-born author Anna Burns, for her coming-of-age story Milkman.
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