Judges tore up the rule book on Monday, awarding the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction jointly to Canadian author Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Anglo-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.
Atwood became only the second female author to win the award twice, sharing the £50,000 (US$62,800) prize at the 50th anniversary ceremony at London’s Guildhall.
The award has been shared twice before, in 1974 and 1997, when the rules were changed to supposedly prevent it from happening again.
Photo: Reuters
The 79-year-old Atwood, who wore a badge of climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, held aloft the arm of her fellow winner as they walked to the podium together.
“I’m very surprised, I would have thought I would have been too elderly,” said Atwood, who was honored for her best-selling sequel to her 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale.
“I don’t need the attention, so I’m very glad that you’re getting some,” she said to Evaristo, joking that as “a good Canadian, we don’t do famous, we think it is in bad taste, so it would have been embarrassing if I’d been alone here.”
Evaristo responded that it was “so incredible to share this with Margaret Atwood, who is such a legend.”
“I am the first black woman to win this prize,” she added, to cheers from the audience.
She later told reporters she was “happy to share it, I’m a sharing person,” adding that the prize money would go on paying off her mortgage.
The title of best work of English-language fiction published in the UK and Ireland has launched careers and courted controversy since its creation in 1969.
Past laureates have ranged from celebrated writers such as Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes to Kazuo Ishiguro and Roddy Doyle.
Paul Beatty became the first US winner when the Booker bowed to pressure and began including authors from outside the British commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe in 2013.
This year’s shortlist featured six novelists — four of them women — born across four continents. The five-judge panel included the writer-broadcaster Afua Hirsch and the British-Chinese novelist and filmmaker Guo Xiaolu (郭小櫓).
Of Atwood’s novel, chair of judges Peter Florence said the panel “loves this examination of complicity and resilience and resistance, we love the language and the story-telling power, we love the ambition.”
Nominated for the 1986 prize, The Handmaid’s Tale became an award-winning TV series in 2017, and sales of the English-language edition have topped 8 million copies worldwide.
Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other tells the tale of 12 women from black British families with roots across the country, Africa and the Caribbean in what judge Florence called a “polyphony.”
He praised it for “giving voice to people who are not always articulated, of making the invisible visible.”
Explaining the decision to break the rules, Florence said the “situation demanded” it.
“We explained this to the Booker people, they said they wouldn’t allow it,” he added. “We spent an hour discussing it... we then took another half an hour, and still came to the conclusion that ... this was our decision.
“They agreed to respect our decision,” he said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese