ATWOOD, EVARISTO SHARE 2019’S BOOKER PRIZE

The Booker Prize for Fiction this year has been awarded jointly to Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and British author Bernardine Evaristo for their novels The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other respectively.

This is the third time the prize has been shared. Previous joint winners are Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) and Stanley Middleton (Holiday) in 1974, and Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger) and Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) in 1992.

With her win, Evaristo becomes the first black woman to take home the prize in the award’s 50-year history. Atwood, meanwhile, becomes the oldest writer to win at the age of 79.

This is also Atwood’s second Booker. She won the prize first in 2000 for her novel The Blind Assassin. With The Testaments, she becomes the fifth writer to have won twice. Previous two-time winners are Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies, 2012), J.M. Coetzee (Life and Times of Michael K, 1983 and Disgrace, 1999), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda, 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang, 2001) and J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur, 1973 and the special Lost Man Booker Prize for Troubles, 2010).

It follows that interest in Booker winners translates to increased sales of their works, and this year is no different. As stated in The Guardian, Evaristo “double[d] lifetime sales” since her win. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which compiles point-of-sale data for books, in the five months since its release in May 2019, Girl, Woman, Other sold less than 4,500 copies. In the five days after the Booker ceremony on Oct 14, it sold nearly 6,000 copies — a boost of approximately 1,300%.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 27th, 2019