Booker Prize Drama! Backlash after prize is awarded to TWO authors, marginalizing the woman of color!

Very clumsy.

ask to be written into the will of the other ... then be patient for a very short time

Is "Bernardine" one of those noisy Discretionary Transvestites we're hearing about all the time now?

Annoying black people, most of them must politicize every fucking thing.

Team Both Authors.

Will they go back and give half the award retroactively to Salman Rushdie for SHAME? That year, it was a tie between him and Coetzee for Life and Times of Michael K, and Fay Weldon, who was chair, was finally told by the committee to go with the Rushdie. On the phone, 30 minutes before the ceremony, she flipped their decision and announced the Coetzee. Rushdie never stopped complaining about it. I actually thought it was silly for the Nobels to announce a 2018 winner and a 2019 winner this year--is there any meaningful instinct in there?

No one reads books anymore. But we'll watch the TV version.

They should have said, "You're right. We shouldn't have split it. Atwood gets it alone. Good luck next time, whatsyername."

Hey, I have no problem with it!

If you haven’t read Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments”, get it. It’s worthy of the award and it’s an astonishing, perfect follow up to “Handmaid’s Tale”, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 1986.

OHHHH... so Atwood hasn't won the Booker prize before?

R11, she has, for The Blind Assassin.

Ah, I see. I haven't read that one. They have Handmaid's Tale assigned in uni English classes though, for a long while now (although frankly I never understood why having kids reading dystopian fiction was supposed to help them want to read more - I hated those books).

Kids shouldn't be forced to read dehumanizing fiction. Life is bad enough.

The whole things reeks of PC crap - we have to have a person of color in on this...…..such bullshit! Just give it to the best person regardless of what their color is.

Arts organizations are filled with SJW non-profit types who live and breathe their own WOKENESS, and are hyper aware of race, class, color and gender. I imagine if both authors were white there would only have been one winner. Just my hunch.

R16. Actually, a fair number of commentators said before hand that the Evaristo was the best of the short list, but probably wouldn't win. I think it's more likely that they included Atwood both as a nod to her politics and as a consolation for being passed over once more for the Nobel.

She should have gotten the prize... a chance to make history??? So sick of this PC shit

r17 it's supposed to be a very good book, too.

It's a prize. These people aren't owed anything. How strange to think otherwise.

r19. r17 here. Yes, the columns I read before the awards were announced focused on the quality at the writing as making it the most deserving of the shortlist. Given the fact that other people of color (albeit not women of color) have won the Booker, I'd be surprised if their decision to give it Evaristo was based on anything other than their sense of the book's merit. Rushdie, Ishiguro, Naipaul, and other writers of color have won--there's a stronger tradition of multiculturalism in the Booker than in the Pulitzer in the US.

They should be forced to see "Slave Play." It will be their punishment.

r21 yeah it's the state of the modern world where people are trying to bully or shame others into doing what they think should be done for whatever political reasons, rather than because the material was good.

Don't publishers have to submit their novelists for the Booker prize, too?

Everything about the lead photo says "Live, from New York, It's Saturday Night!"

Curious detail from Evaristo’s Wikipedia page:

“Evaristo was a radical lesbian in the 1980s but she says that her sexuality changed subsequently. She is now married to a man she met online in 2006.”

What exactly is a "radical Lesbian"?

Radical Lesbians never shave armpits and they free-bleed.

Whatever happened to the gracious "thank you"?

R28, what am I missing? her response to winning seems gracious to me.

Shouldn't they have an odd numbered jury, so there isn't a tie?

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