Booker Prize 2019: Who could win the £50,000 award?
Written by News on 15/10/2019
The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is to be announced this evening, with author Margaret Atwood the favourite for her follow up to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Salman Rushdie, who, like Atwood, has won before, is also on the shortlist for the £50,000 literary prize.
The other nominees are Lucy Ellmann, Bernadine Evaristo, Chigozie Obioma and Elif Shafak.
Last year’s winner was Anna Burns, for Milkman, which made her the first writer from Northern Ireland to take the title and the first woman to win since 2013. The story has now been translated into nearly 40 different languages and Burns is in the process of negotiating a film deal.
The 2019 ceremony is the first since investment firm Man Group announced it was pulling out of sponsoring the award after 17 years.
The winner will be revealed at a ceremony in London.
Here is the shortlist:
Salman Rushdie – Quichotte
After winning the prize for Midnight’s Children in 1981, this year’s nomination is now Rushdie’s fifth.
Midnight’s Children is one of the most successful books in the award’s history, being named the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993, to mark the 25th anniversary of the prize, and the “Best of the Booker” to mark the 40th anniversary in 2008.
Inspired by Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Quichotte is the story of an ageing travelling salesman who falls in love with a TV star and sets off to drive across the US on a quest to prove himself worthy of her.
Margaret Atwood – The Testaments
The Testaments is the long-awaited sequel to Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which was shortlisted for the prize in 1986 but did not win.
Atwood went on to take the award for The Blind Assassin in 2000, and was also shortlisted in 1989, 1996 and 2003 – making her the joint top author for the most nominations, alongside Iris Murdoch.
The Handmaid’s Tale, set in the totalitarian state of Gilead, was adapted into a critically acclaimed and award-winning TV series starring Elisabeth Moss in 2017.
The Testaments picks up 15 years after the first novel and is narrated by three female characters.
Lucy Ellmann – Ducks, Newburyport
This is the first nomination for Ellmann, a US-born British novelist who won the Guardian Fiction Prize for her first novel, Sweet Desserts, published in 1988.
If Ducks, Newburyport goes on to claim the award, it would be the longest winning novel in the prize’s history, at 998 pages. The current longest winning novel is the 832-page The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, from 2013.
The novel tells the story of an Ohio housewife who is trying to bridge the gaps between reality and the “torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America”.
Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other
Described as a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood, Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s first Booker nomination.
It follows the lives and struggles of 12 very different people in Britain, predominantly female and black, and is billed as a “fusion fiction” novel.
Evaristo’s portfolio includes novels, short fiction, poetry and essays and two of her works, The Emperor’s Babe and Hello Mum, have been adapted into radio dramas.
Chigozie Obioma – An Orchestra of Minorities
His debut, The Fisherman, which has been adapted for the West End, was nominated for the prize in 2015, and An Orchestra Of Minorities is his second novel – making it two out of two.
Set across Nigeria and Cyprus, the novel tells the story of a young farmer who prevents a woman from falling to her death from a bridge. Bonded by the experience, they fall in love, but he is rejected by her family because of his lowly status.
Elif Shafak – 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
British-Turkish novelist Shafak is the most widely read female author in Turkey.
This is her first Booker Prize nomination, for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which tells the story of a Turkish woman reflecting on her life in the immediate moments after her death.
Shafak is also a political activist who was tried and acquitted in 2006 for “insulting Turkishness” in one of her books, and was put under investigation by authorities again in May.
In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of 12 people who would make the world better.
(c) Sky News 2019: Booker Prize 2019: Who could win the £50,000 award?
