Atwood's 'Handmaid's Tale' sequel favourite for Booker Prize
dpa
LONDON (dpa)- "The Testaments," a sequel to Margaret Atwood's hugely popular "The Handmaid's Tale," is the favourite for this year's Booker Prize for literature, to be announced late Monday.
Atwood and another celebrated former Booker winner, Salman Rushdie, are among six authors whose works are shortlisted for the prestigious 50,000-pound (63,000-dollar) prize for English-language works, now in its 51st year.
The nationalities of the four women and two men reflect "the polyglot and intermingled nature of the modern world," the organizers said.
The nominees are British writer Bernardine Evaristo, Nigerian Chigozie Obioma, Canadian Atwood, Indian-British-American Rushdie, British-American Lucy Ellmann and Turkish-British Elif Shafak.
"The Testaments" is set more than 15 years after "The Handmaid’s Tale," when the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead remains all-powerful but shows signs of "rot from within."
"The stories encompass a modern reworking of Don Quixote set in America and Britain and taking in opioids and meta fiction by Rushdie... [and] a story of a life after death in Istanbul, narrated by a murdered woman as her life force ebbs, from Shafak," the judges said.
Evaristo was shortlisted for her "intersecting stories of 12 black women whose lives touch in 20th and 21st century Britain;" while Obloma has produced "a star-crossed love story set in Nigeria and Cyprus;" and Ellmann's work is a "thousand-page, one-sentence freewheeling epic about information and ecology," they said.
Northern Irish author Anna Burns won the 2018 prize for her novel "Milkman," which portrays an isolated young woman navigating life in the shadow of paramilitary violence.
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