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BRITAIN-LITERATURE-BOOKER-AWARD
Atwood, Rushdie vie for Britain’s 50th Booker Prize
LONDON, United Kingdom, Oct 14, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Britain’s storied Booker
Prize will pit literary giants Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie against
four emerging stars when it unveils the winner Monday on its 50th anniversary
award.
The title of best work of English-language fiction published in the United
Kingdom and Ireland has launched careers and courted controversy since its
creation in 1969.
Past laureates have ranged from celebrated writers such as Ian McEwan and
Julian Barnes to Kazuo Ishiguro and Roddy Doyle.
Paul Beatty became the first American winner when the Booker bowed to
pressure and began including authors from outside the British commonwealth,
Ireland and Zimbabwe in 2013.
This year’s shortlist features six novelists — four of them women — born
across four continents. It is also no longer called the Man Booker because of
a sponsorship change.
The five-judge panel includes the writer-broadcaster Afua Hirsch and the
British-Chinese novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo.
– 1,000-page sentence –
Canadian author Atwood’s sixth Booker nomination comes for “The
Testaments”, a best-selling sequel to her 1985 dystopian classic “The
Handmaid’s Tale”.
The Guardian said the book, which picks up the tale of three women 15 years
on, presents “Atwood at her best”.
“It’s a question of things escaping from a book to the real world and the
author has zero control,” the 79-year-old said upon its release last month.
Nominated for the 1986 prize, “The Handmaid’s Tale” became an award-winning
TV series in 2017, and sales of the English-language edition have topped
eight million copies worldwide.
Rushdie, whose contender is called “Quichotte”, won the Booker Prize in
1981 for “Midnight’s Children”.
His tragicomedy this year, inspired by the classic “Don Quixote”, is the
story of an ageing 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 told HBO last month that he researched the book by “watching all
this reality TV, which (the protagonist) loves. I began to understand that it
could drive a person crazy”.
Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma made the shortlist for “An Orchestra of
Minorities” — his second novel after “The Fishermen”, which was shortlisted
in 2015.
Set in Nigeria — the author’s homeland — and Cyprus, it is a tragic love
story with a strong sense of foreboding throughout.
Narrated by the main character’s chi spirit, it is richly poetic and deeply
anchored in the mysticism of Nigeria’s Igbo people.
Lucy Ellmann challenges readers with “Ducks, Newburyport” — a story made
up almost entirely of one sentence that absorbs readers and is occasionally
funny.
It is a stream of thoughts from a woman making pies in her home in Ohio.
The musings weave between her family, US politics, her dead parents and pets,
pollution in rivers, and are interspersed with references to popular culture.
Anglo-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo is shortlisted for “Girl, Woman,
Other” — about the lives of black British families with roots across the
country, Africa and the Caribbean.
It tells the tale of 12 women that “brims with vitality,” according to the
Financial Times.
Elif Shafak, the 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”.
The entire work describes the last 10 minutes of conscious thought of a
dying prostitute that The Times calls “surprisingly uplifting”.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0904 hrs