Congratulations to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo who have been named joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction!

Atwood’s The Testaments is the long-awaited sequel to Atwood’s iconic and prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Mixing the heart-racing pace of a thriller and the gut-twisting tension of espionage, this return to Gilead has been well worth the wait.

The judges call it a ‘a savage and beautiful novel that speaks to us today with conviction and power’.

Evaristo‘s Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve distinct narrators – mostly women, black and British – as they tell stories of struggle, longing, betrayal and sacrifice through the past hundred years.

The judges call it a ‘must-read about modern Britain and womanhood.’

Chair of the 2019 judges, Peter Florence, says: ‘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.’

The Booker Prize has only been jointly awarded twice before, to Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton in 1974 and to Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth in 1992.

The Booker Prize for Fiction is a £50,000 literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK. Atwood and Evaristo will share the prize money.

You can read more about the prize here.