Question: Who is the winner of 2019 Booker Prize?
(a) Margaret Atwood
(b) Bernardine Evaristo
(c) Lucy Ellmann
(d) Both (a) & (b)
Answer: (d)
Related facts:
- Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been declared the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction after judges defied the single winner norm by declaring a tie.
- Being joint winners, the pair will split the literary award’s £50,000 prize money equally.
- Margaret Atwood received the award for her novel–‘The Testament’ whereas Bernardine Evaristo has been awarded the Booker Prize for her novel ‘Girl, Woman, Other’.
- The Testaments is a follow up to Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale.
- Total of six books were shortlisted for the award alongwith Salman Rushdie’s tragicomic ‘Quichotte’.
- Having won the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo became the first black woman and the first black British writer to achieve the feat.
- Also, 79-year-old Canadian author Margaret Atwood became the oldest to win Booker Prize.
- Margaret Atwood is the second women author to win the Booker Award twice and fourth overall writer.She had her first in 2000 for ‘The Blind Assassin’.
Booker Prize:
- The Booker Prize awards any novel originally written in English and published in the UK and Ireland in the year of the prize, regardless of the nationality of their author.
- The prize was first awarded in 1969. In 2018 Northern Irish writer Anna Burns won the Booker Prize for ‘Milkman’.
Links:
https://thebookerprizes.com/fiction
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50014906
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/margaret-atwood-and-bernardine-evaristo-joint-winners-of-booker-prize/article29685638.ece