IT WAS NOT meant to happen. . Yet on October 14th a panel of judges announced that Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo would share the accolade—and the £50,000 prize money—for “The Testaments” and “Girl, Woman, Other”. In the end, the judges said, they “couldn’t separate” the two novels: hours of deliberation and taking of votes “didn’t work”.
Ms Atwood was the favourite to win from a shortlist of six, with bookmakers offering odds of 2/1 ahead of the announcement. “The Testaments”, a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale” , had been hailed as “the publishing event of the year” and enjoyed a lavish publicity campaign. The book had been optioned for television by Hulu and MGM even before its release on September 10th.
Ms Atwood created in its predecessor, where the United States government has been overthrown by an extremist Christian group. In Gilead, a theocratic totalitarian state, men and women are forced into strict roles; women are forbidden from having jobs, owning property or even reading. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is the testimony of Offred, who is made to bear the children of a high-ranking officer, and it depicted the regime in its ascendancy.
Having won the Booker in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin”, a complex work of historical fiction, Ms Atwood becomes the fourth writer to have claimed the prize twice. Some critics have argued that crowning “The Testaments” was a way for the judges to retrospectively acknowledge the political and cultural importance of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, which was shortlisted for the prize in 1986 but lost out to Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”.
Ms Evaristo is by no means new to the profession—“Girl, Woman, Other” is her eighth novel—and her writing has a muscular, assured confidence. But carpers think splitting the award overshadows Ms Evaristo’s achievement, and the fact that she is the first black woman to win the prize. “Girl, Woman, Other” tells the stories of 12 characters who, in the past century, have made Britain their home.
The face of PC Britain today compulsory African descent included in everthing ?
It's a shared prize but bravo for ignoring the co-winner!!!👏👏👏👏👏
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