Published 12:14 IST, October 14th 2019
Booker Prize: Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie nominated with 4 others
The Booker Prize 2019 is set to unveil the winner on its 50th-anniversary award on October 14. This year the award committee has shortlisted six novelists
The Booker Prize 2019 is set to unveil the winner on its 50th-anniversary award on October 14. This year the award committee has shortlisted six novelists, out of which four are women born across four continents. The prize will be pitting the two literary giants, Marget Atwood and Salman Rushdie, as well. The Canadian Author Atwood is nominated for The Testaments, a sequel to her 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale. On the other hand, Salman Rushdie is nominated for Quichotte. The five-judge panel reportedly includes the writer-broadcaster Afua Hirsch and the British-Chinese novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo.
Marget Atwood's book The Testaments released last month and is said to be Atwood's best work to date. According to an international media outlet, the book picks up the tale of three women 15 years on. Atwood reportedly claimed that the book is a question of things escaping from a book to the real world. Her 1987 novel The Handmaid's Tale became an award-winning TV series in 2017, and the sales of the English-Language edition have topped eight million copies worldwide.
Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, has already won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight's Children. His book, Quichotte, for which he is nominated is a tragicomedy and inspired by Don Quixote. The novel is a story of an aging travelling salesman who falls in love with a TV star and sets off to drive across America on a quest to prove himself worthy of her hand. Rushdie claimed that he researched the book by watching all the reality TV shows which could drive a person crazy.
Other Nominees
Chigozie Obioma, a Nigerian author made the shortlist for An Orchestra of Minorities which is his second novel after The Fishermen. The novel nominated for the 2019 Booker Prize is a tragic love story with a strong sense of foreboding throughout. It is richly poetic and deeply anchored in the mysticism of Nigeria's Igbo people. Author Lucy Ellmann's novel Ducks, Newburyport is a story made up almost entirely of one sentence that absorbs readers and is occasionally funny. The novel is a stream of thoughts from a woman making pies in her home in Ohio. The author claims that the novel is amusing weave between her family, US politics, her dead parents and pets, pollution in rivers, and are interspersed with references to popular culture. The anglo-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo, shortlisted for Girl, Woman, Other which is about the lives of black British families with roots across the country, Africa and the Caribbean. Elif Shafak, another most widely read female author in Turkey, brings Istanbul's underworld to life through the recollections of sex worker Tequila Leila in 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.
(With inputs from agencies)
Updated 17:17 IST, October 14th 2019