Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo are the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize with The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other

• Breaking the Booker Prize rules, the judges have split the prize between two authors.
• Atwood is the fourth author to have won the prize twice
• Evaristo is the first black woman to claim the prize since it began in 1969
• The Testaments is the third sequel to have won the prize, following Pat Parker’s The Ghost Road (1995) and Hilary Mantel’ Bring Up the Bodies (2012)
•  “One of the greatest writers of the past century. A world without Margaret Atwood in it would not be anywhere near as brilliant” The Sunday Times
• “If you want to understand modern day Britain, [Evaristo] is the writer to read… a story for our times.” New Statesman

 

In a shock announcement, the judges of the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction have tonight (Monday 14 October) awarded the prize to two authors: Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

 

The Booker Prize has been jointly awarded twice before, to Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton in 1974 and to Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth in 1992. In 1993, the rules were changed so that only one author could win the prize. This is the first time since then that two authors have been announced as joint-winners. The 2019 winners will share the £50,000 prize money.

 

It is the second time that Atwood has won the Booker Prize, having won in 2000 with The Blind Assassin. She has been shortlisted for four further books: The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Cat’s Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996) and Oryx and Crake (2003).

 

Bernardine Evaristo is the first black woman to be awarded the Booker Prize. She wins with Girl, Woman, Other, her eighth book of fiction, which she has written alongside essays, drama and writing for BBC radio. Evaristo drew on aspects of the African diaspora, be it past, present, real of imagined, to inform Girl, Woman, Other.

 

Chair of the 2019 judges, Peter Florence, comments:

 

“This ten month process has been a wild adventure. In the room today we talked for five hours about books we love. Two novels we cannot compromise on. They are both phenomenal books that will delight readers and will resonate for ages to come.”

 

Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds:

 

“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. 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.”

 

The Testaments is set more than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

 

The New York Times said, “Atwood’s sheer assurance as a storyteller makes for a fast, immersive narrative that’s as propulsive as it is melodramatic,” while The Guardian wrote that Atwood’s “angry, pacey sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale admits a ray of light into Gilead’s toxic world”.

 

Writing on the story behind her book for The Guardian, Atwood said: “In many ways, The Testaments is an answer to all the questions readers have been asking me about The Handmaid’s Tale over the years. But it also belongs to our moment of history, when things in a number of countries seem to be heading more toward Gilead than away from it”.

 

The Testaments is published by Penguin Random House imprint Chatto and Windus making it the fourth time the prize has been won by that imprint. Previous winners published by Chatto and Windus are: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan in 2014; Possession by A.S. Byatt in 1990; and The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch in 1978.

 

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of 12 very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

 

The New Statesman said of Evaristo that “if you want to understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read”, and called Girl, Woman, Other “a story for our times.” Stylist meanwhile described it as ‘'Exceptional. Ambitious, flowing and all-encompassing, an offbeat narrative that'll leave your mind in an invigorated whirl’.

 

Writing on the story behind her book for The Guardian, Evaristo said: “Fiction excavates and reimagines our histories; investigates, disrupts, validates and contextualises our societies and subjectivities; exercises our imaginations through flights of fancy, takes the reader on transformational adventures, and probes and presents our motivations, problems and dramas. What, then, does it mean to not see yourself reflected in your nation’s stories? This has been the ongoing debate of my professional career as a writer stretching back nearly forty years, and we black British women know, that if we don’t write ourselves into literature, no one else will”.

 

Girl, Woman, Other is published by Penguin Random House imprint Hamish Hamilton, making it the third time the prize has been won by that imprint. The other winners were: Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth in 1992, and The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai in 2006.

 

The winners were chosen by a panel of five judges: founder and director of Hay Festival Peter Florence (Chair); former fiction publisher and editor Liz Calder; novelist, essayist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo; writer, broadcaster and former barrister Afua Hirsch; and concert pianist, conductor and composer Joanna MacGregor.  The judges chose from 151 submitted books.

 

Atwood and Evaristo were announced by chair of judges, Peter Florence at a dinner at London’s Guildhall at a ceremony hosted by TV presenter and judge of the ‘The Lost Man Booker Prize,’ Katy Derham. Atwood was presented with a trophy by last year’s winner, Anna Burns, and a £50,000 cheque by chair of the judges, Peter Florence. She also received a designer bound edition of her book and a further £2,500 for being shortlisted. The book binding will be on display to the public, alongside the shortlist bound books, for two weeks from tomorrow at Bonhams Auction House, Montpelier Street, London SW7 1HH.  

 

The event was broadcast live on the BBC News Channel in the UK, on BBC World TV News internationally, and streamed online for international audiences via BBC Arts and The Booker Prizes Facebook page. Actors Franc Ashman, Paapa Essiedu and Elizabeth McGovern read extracts from the shortlisted books at the ceremony. All the shortlisted authors attended alongside a number of former winners, including Anna Burns, Alan Hollinghurst and Ben Okri.

 

Royal Mail is again issuing a congratulatory postmark featuring the winner’s name, which will be applied to millions of items of stamped mail nationwide on 15 October. It will read ‘Congratulations to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize’.

 

On winning the Booker Prize, an author can expect international recognition, plus a dramatic increase in book sales. In the week following the 2018 winner announcement, sales of Milkman by Anna Burns increased by 880% from 963 in the week prior to the announcement to 9,446, then a further 99% (9,446 to 18,786) the following week. The total number of copies of Milkman sold, across all formats, is currently 602,289.

 

Milkman has now been translated into nearly 40 different languages, both in Europe and throughout Asia. Faber published a special Liberty London edition of the book in September. As well as winning the Man Booker Prize in 2018, Milkman went on to win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Rathbone Folio Prize in 2019.

 

Recent adaptations of Booker/Man Booker Prize-winning books include Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013), which will be shown by the BBC as a six-part adaptation next year; Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015), which will become an Amazon TV series; Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) have led to award-winning adaptations on stage and screen; and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (2011) was released as a film in 2017.

 

The leading prize for quality fiction in English

 

First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize is recognised as the leading prize for literary fiction written in English. The list of former winners features many of the literary giants of the last five decades: from Iris Murdoch to Marlon James, Ian McEwan to Hilary Mantel.

 

The rules of the prize were changed at the end of 2013 to embrace the English language ‘in all its vigour, its vitality, its versatility and its glory’, opening it up to writers beyond the UK and Commonwealth, providing they were writing novels in English and published in the UK or Ireland.

 

The Booker Prize is supported by Crankstart, a charitable foundation.

 

The Booker Prizes podcast series will be releasing a winner podcast, featuring an interview with Margaret Atwood, behind the scenes content from the Southbank Centre green room and the winner ceremony at the Guildhall, available from Friday 18 October.

 

More information about the prize is available at:

www.thebookerprizes.com

@TheBookerPrizes | #FinestFiction |#BookerPrize2019

 

For all press enquiries please contact:

Four Culture on +44(0)20 3697 4200

Chloe Davies [email protected]

Laura Steele [email protected]

 

 

Judges’ comment: “It is a savage and beautiful novel that speaks to us today with conviction and power. The bar is set unusually high for Atwood. She soars.”

 

Synopsis: More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

 

Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets.

 

As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

 

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada on 18 November 1939. She is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. She won the 2000 Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin and was shortlisted for the Prize with The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Cat’s Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996) and Oryx and Crake (2003). The Handmaid's Tale went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump and the 2017 transmission of the award-winning TV series [It was a Hulu series, screened on Channel 4]. Sales of the English language edition have now topped eight million copies worldwide. Atwood’s further awards include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

 

Judges’ comment: “A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood. This is an impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves. With a dazzling rhythm, Evaristo takes us on a journey of intergenerational stories, moving through different spaces and heritages: African, Caribbean, European. Her 12 main characters manifest the highs and lows of our social life. They are artists, bankers, teachers, cleaners, housewives, and are at various stages of womanhood, from adolescence to old age. Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humour. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum. The language wraps the reader by force, with the quality of oral traditions and poetry. This is a novel that deserves to be read aloud and to be performed and celebrated in all kinds of media.”

 

Synopsis: Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of 12 very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.  Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

 

Bernardine Evaristo was born in London on 28 May 1959. She is the Anglo-Nigerian author of seven other books of fiction and verse that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. Her writing also spans short fiction, reviews, essays, drama and writing for BBC radio. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. As a literary activist for inclusion she has founded several successful initiatives including Spread the Word writer development agency (1995 – ongoing); The Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour (2007-2017) and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2012 – ongoing). She was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2009. She lives in London.

 

Notes to Editors
 

• Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo are available for interview.
  • To arrange an interview with Margaret Atwood, please contact Fran Owen / Mari Yamazaki at Vintage, Chatto & Windus. Tel: 02078408688, Email: [email protected]
  • To arrange an interview with Bernardine Evaristo, please contact Anna Ridley at Penguin, Viking. Tel: 02071393668, Email [email protected]
  •  

 

• The winners of the 2019 Booker Prize was chosen from 151 submissions. The 2019 shortlisted titles were:

Margaret Atwood (Canada)   The Testaments (Chatto & Windus)

Lucy Ellmann (UK/USA)       Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)

Bernardine Evaristo (UK)     Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)

Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)   An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)

Salman Rushdie (UK/India)   Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)

Elif Shafak (Turkey/UK)       10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)

 

• The special designer bound edition of the 2019 Booker Prize winning books were created by Stephen Conway (The Testaments) and Sue Doggett (Girl, Woman, Other). Special designer bound editions of the shortlist were created by  Tom McEwan (Ducks, Newburyport), Sue Doggett (Girl, Woman, Other),  Nicky Oliver (An Orchestra of Minorities), Mark Cockram (Quichotte) and Angela James (10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World)

 

• Please find images of the authors and jackets here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j4yz9ukjpgaaiza/AAAtalA92MNoANtiUrpjwk6Ua?dl=0

 

• The 2019 shortlist consists of 6 books. UK and Irish publishers may submit novels written in the English language and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019. The number of books a publisher can submit will depend on that publisher’s inclusion in longlists over the previous five years, as follows:
   

• Publishers with no longlistings – 1 submission
• Publishers with 1 or 2 longlisting(s) – 2 submissions
• Publishers with 3 or 4 longlistings – 3 submissions
• Publishers with 5 or more longlistings – 4 submissions
   

• This means that the number of submissions for each publisher may change from year to year. A new work by any author who has previously been shortlisted for the Booker (pre-2002) or Man Booker Prize (2002-2018) is automatically eligible
   
• The judges ‘call in’ a number of novels each year: in addition to their main submission, a publisher may submit a list of up to five titles for consideration, accompanied by a justification from the editor. The judges are required to call in no fewer than eight and no more than 12 of these titles. The judges are also permitted to call in other books published within the requisite dates, even if the book has not been submitted through any other route
   
• This is the second year that novels published in Ireland are eligible for the prize, following a change in rules announced at the start of 2018 that recognised the special relationship between the UK and Irish publishing markets.
   
• Four Culture handles PR and event management for the prize and provides all administrative back-up
   
• The Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation is Gaby Wood. The Administrator of the International Booker Prize is Fiammetta Rocco – Culture Correspondent at The Economist and 1843
   
• Anna Burns won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Milkman (Faber). In the week following the 2018 winner announcement, sales of Milkman by Anna Burns increased by 880% from 963 in the week prior to the announcement to 9,446, then a further 99% (9,446 to 18,786) the following week. The total number of copies of Milkman sold, across all formats, is currently 546,500.
   
• The Booker Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1969 and was called The Man Booker Prize for Fiction when sponsored by Man Group from 2002 - 2018. For a full history of the prize including previous winners, shortlisted authors and judges visit the website: www.thebookerprizes.com 
   
• The International Booker Prize is awarded annually in May for the best single work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK, and was formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize when sponsored by Man Group. The £50,000 prize is divided equally between the author and the translator. Each shortlisted author and translator receives £1,000. The 2019 winner was Celestial Bodies written by Jokha Alharthi and translated by Marilyn Booth. Chaired by Bettany Hughes, award-winning historian, author and broadcaster, the 2019 panel consisted of: writer, translator and president of English PEN Maureen Freely, philosopher Professor Angie Hobbs FRSA; novelist and satirist Elnathan John; and essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra
   
• The Booker Prize Foundation is a registered charity (no 1090049) established in 2002. It is responsible for the award of The Booker/Man Booker Prize for Fiction and for the International Booker Prize /Man Booker International Prize. The trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation are: Baroness Kennedy QC (Chair) – former Chair of the British Council and Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University; Nick Barley – Director of Edinburgh International Book Festival; Bidisha SK Mamata – writer, critic and broadcaster; Carol Lake – Managing Director, Philanthropy Executive at JPMorgan Chase; James Naughtie – broadcaster; Ben Okri  poet and author; Christopher Pearce – former Finance Director of Rentokil plc; Professor Louise Richardson – Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford; The Rt Hon. Lord David Willetts – writer, ex-minister and advocate of fairness between the generations. Jonathan Taylor CBE is President of the Foundation and Sir Ronald Harwood, Baroness Neuberger and Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne are Vice Presidents
   
• The Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee, which advises on any changes to the rules and on the selection of the judges, represents all aspects of the book world. Its members are: Jamie Byng - publisher; Jonty Claypole – Head of Arts, BBC; James Daunt – Managing Director of Waterstones; Jonathan Douglas – Director of the National Literacy Trust; Adam Freudenheim – publisher, Pushkin Press; Daniel Hahn - writer and translator; Peter Kemp – Chief Fiction Reviewer, The Sunday Times; Sharmaine Lovegrove - publisher; Fiammetta Rocco – Culture Correspondent, The Economist and 1843 and The International Booker Prize Administrator; Michal Shavit – publishing director, Jonathan Cape; Eve Smith – Secretary, the Booker Prize Foundation; Boyd Tonkin – writer and critic; Helen Williams – Legal Counsel of Booker Group plc. It is chaired by Gaby Wood - Literary Director, The Booker Prize Foundation
   
• Crankstart, the charitable foundation of Sir Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, is the new supporter of The Booker Prize and The International Booker Prize. Crankstart has committed to an initial five-year exclusive funding term with an option to renew for a further five years. The new arrangement began on 1 June 2019 and saw the original prize return to being known as The Booker Prize, while the prize for literature in translation has become The International Booker Prize.
   
• Michael Moritz is a British venture capitalist and author, born in Wales. He studied at the University of Oxford and was a journalist before moving into the world of technology investment. He has been a partner at Sequoia Capital since 1986. He was appointed KBE in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to promoting British economic interests and philanthropy. Heyman is a former journalist with The New York Times, and a writer.
   
• Booker is the UK's leading food wholesaler with 198 business centres and a national delivery network. It serves over 441,000 catering customers, 94,000 independent retailers and 641,000 small businesses.
   
• The Booker Prize Foundation has a longstanding partnership with RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People). The Foundation funds the production of the shortlisted titles in braille, giant print and audio, which the sight loss charity produces by the date the winner is announced. The accessible versions are then made available to the tens of thousands of blind and partially sighted members of the RNIB Library. People with sight loss have a limited choice of books in accessible formats and often have to wait much longer than their sighted peers for titles to be made available to them –and there are many more books that they will never have the chance to read. The Foundation is working with RNIB to change this story. For further information contact the RNIB PR Team on 020 7391 2223 or [email protected]  
   
• The Booker Prize Foundation has partnered with the National Literary Trust since 2012 to deliver Books Unlocked. The Foundation funds the programme, which has transformed the lives of prisoners and young offenders in the UK by helping them develop a love of reading. Prisoners are able to engage with high-quality writing as copies of Booker Prize shortlisted titles are sent out to prison reading groups. These same titles are also serialised as audiobooks on National Prison Radio, which is broadcast into c.80,000 cells, enabling still more prisoners to experience these exceptional stories. Authors go into prisons to discuss their writing directly with reading groups and many also record interviews on National Prison Radio. The shared vision for Books Unlocked is to bring about positive change in prisoners’ life chances. Since 1993, the National Literacy Trust has led the campaign to transform the future of the UK’s most disadvantaged young people by improving their literacy levels: literacytrust.org.uk/programmes/books-unlocked/   
   
• The Booker Prize Archive was given on loan in 2003 to Oxford Brookes University, where it now resides

Four Culture
October 2019