Booker prize: Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and British author Bernardine Evaristo named joint winners

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and British author Bernardine Evaristo split the Booker cash.

The Booker judges have awarded the prize to joint winners for the first time in almost 30 years: Margaret Atwood, left, and Bernardine Evaristo, right.

The Booker Prize broke rules and set precedents on Tuesday when the judges awarded the £50,000 award to two writers: Canada’s Margaret Atwood for The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anglo-Nigerian author Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Women, Other, a novel centred on 12 marginalised women.

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The judges, led by Peter Florence, stood firm on dividing the prize despite a rule forbidding joint winners that was introduced after the 1992 award, which was shared by Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Barry Unsworth’s Scared Hunger.

“We tried voting,’’ he said of the last-minute deliberations, held at the insistence of the Booker Prize Foundation chair Baroness Kennedy, “but it didn’t work.”

Atwood, 79, became the oldest Booker winner since the prize was first awarded in 1969. She took the stage at London’s Guildhall with her co-winner Evaristo, who is 60, joined hands with her and raised a joint victory salute.

“We’re both got curly hair,’’ she noted. “I am very happy that we are both here. It would have been quite embarrassing for me to be here alone. I am a Canadian and we don’t do famous. It’s not a good look.”

Atwood, who won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, became the fourth dual winner of the award. The others are JM Coetzee, Peter Carey and Hilary Mantel.

Evaristo, born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father, became the first black women to win the Booker.

“It is so incredible to share this with Margaret Atwood, who is such a legend,’’ she said. “I will also say that I am the first black woman to win this prize, and I hope that honour doesn’t last too long.”

Margaret Atwood poses with her book The Testaments.

British author Bernardine Evaristo poses with her book Girl, Woman, Other.

Florence, best known as the director of the Hay Literary Festival, said Evaristo’s novel, with its cast of marginalised women, most of them black, in Britain over the span of 100 years “made the invisible visible”.

He said Atwood’s novel, set 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, “might have looked like science fiction back in the day … Now it looks more politically urgent than ever before.”

He said the judges did not want to compromise by choosing just one of the two books, so decided “the only course of action was to flout the rules”.

“The more we talked about them, the more we found we loved them both so much we wanted them both to win.”

The other short-listed novels were the 1000-page Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellman; An Orchestra of Minorities, by Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma; Quichotte, by previous winner Salman Rushdie; and 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World, by Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak.