The 2019 Booker Prize has been jointly awarded to two authors for the first time since 1992.
Citing an inability to separate the two works, the judging panel broke the rules and awarded the prize to both Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.
Atwood and Evaristo will share the £50,000 prize money equally.
The Testaments is the electrifying sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, in which Margaret Atwood answers the question that readers have been asking for decades: What on earth happened to Offred? Picking up 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, it follows three different women from Gilead as they navigate a brutally oppressive state that is collapsing in on itself.
Peter Florence, chair of the 2019 judging panel, said, “It does massively more than follow the single story that we had from Offred. This is beautiful in its depth and exploration of the world of Gilead. As she has said, it might have looked like science fiction back in the day, although all of the extremities are rooted in fact. Now it looks more politically urgent than ever before.”
(Read our review here)
Girl, Woman, Other is described as a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood. It’s told through the voices of twelve different characters, mostly women who are black and British, as they tell the stories and struggles of their brilliant lives.
Peter Florence said, “There are stories there of people who haven’t been visibly represented in contemporary literature, and in that sense this book is groundbreaking, and I hope encouraging and inspiring to the rest of the publishing industry.”
Bernardine Evaristo is the first black woman to win the prize.
See what the 2019 Booker Prize judges had to say below!
Shop the 2019 Booker Prize shortlist here
About the Contributor
Olivia Fricot
Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.
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