2019 Booker Prize

In a surprise move, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been named the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize. The £50,000 award will be split between Atwood’s The Testaments, and Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other.

Evaristo becomes the first black woman to win the Booker since it was launched in 1969. Her book, told in the voices of 12 different characters, mostly black British women, is written in a blend of poetry and prose, a hybrid that Evaristo calls “fusion fiction”.

Atwood’s The Testaments is the sequel to her 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. She previously won the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.

Anna Burns’s Milkman, an experimental novel about a woman during Northern Ireland’s civil conflict, has sold over 500,000 copies since winning the prize last year.