LONDON: Judges tore up the rule book on Monday, awarding the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction jointly to Canadian author Margaret Atwood for "The Testaments" and Anglo-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo for "Girl, Woman, Other".
Atwood becomes only the second female author to win the award twice, sharing the £50,000 ($62,800, 60,000 euros) prize at the 50th anniversary ceremony at London´s Guildhall.
The award has been shared twice before, in 1974 and 1997, when the rules were changed to supposedly prevent it from happening again.
The 79-year-old Atwood, who wore a badge of climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, held aloft the arm of her fellow winner as they walked to the podium together.
"I´m very surprised, I would have thought I would have been too elderly," said Atwood, who was honoured for her best-selling sequel to her 1985 dystopian classic "The Handmaid´s Tale".
"I don´t need the attention, so I´m very glad that you´re getting some," she said to Evaristo, joking that as "a good Canadian, we don´t do famous, we think it is in bad taste, so it would have been embarrassing if I´d been alone here".
Evaristo responded that it was "so incredible to share this with Margaret Atwood, who is such a legend.
"I am the first black woman to win this prize," she added, to cheers from the audience.
"Macron resign," "you're talking nonsense," "water, water, water", young people and mothers shout at president
Since May 2023, some 260 people have been killed in and more than 60,000 displaced
Yoon has been stripped of his duties by parliament following his short-lived martial law declaration
Public health activities can suffer as more than half of agency's workers to be furloughed
President Biden took office pledging to ease immigration policies, but gradually toughened enforcement approach
"We just don’t know really very much at all about the actual policy," says head of US central bank
