2019 Booker Prize: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo jointly win

The 2019 Booker Prize was jointly won by Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo after judges defied the rules by declaring a tie. Even though the organisers told 2019’s judges that they were not allowed to pick two winners, but Peter Florence, the chair of the five-member judging panel, decided to flout the rules anyways. The rules were changed after the last tie in 1992.

2019 Booker Prize

Although as per the Booker rules the prize must not be divided, however the judges insisted they could not separate the 79-year-old Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s – ‘The Testament’ and ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ by Bernardine Evaristo. Evaristo is the first black woman to win prestigious award since its creation in 1969.

Others Shortlisted Entries:  The other 4 authors (out of 6) shortlisted for the prize included Lucy Ellmann for ‘Ducks, Newburyport’, Chigozie Obioma for ‘An Orchestra of Minorities‘, Elif Shafak for ’10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World’ and British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie’s tragicomic ‘Quichotte’. This was the 5th time that Mumbai-born novelist was shortlisted, including the 1981 win where he bagged award for “Midnight’s Children”.

The 2019 shortlisted entries were selected from 151 submitted books published in UK/Ireland between October 2018 and September 2019. Each of the shortlisted authors received GBP 2,500 and a specially-bound edition of their book.

Booker Prize

It is a literary prize which is awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in United Kingdom (UK). The prize is open to writers of any nationality.

For the first time in 2019, the Booker Prize for Fiction is supported by venture capitalist Michael Moritz and novelist wife Harriet Heyman’s charitable foundation Crankstart, rather than the Man Group.

The prize was first awarded in 1969. In 2018 Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won the Booker Prize for ‘Milkman’

Month: Current Affairs - October, 2019