Four Women In Shortlist of Six For Booker Prize 2019. Salman Rushdie And Margaret Atwood Emerge As Top Contenders

There are four women in the shortlist of six for the Booker Prize 2019 announced on Tuesday in London. Literary heavyweights and previous winners Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie lead the chart as top contenders even as there are diverse voices with equal potential to make the cut in the prize that never ceases to surprise.

Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Bernardine Evaristo, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak are the shortlisted authors. The shortlist was announced by the 2019 Chair of Judges Peter Florence, at a press conference at London¡¯s British Library.

¡°The common thread is our admiration for the extraordinary ambition of each of these books. There is an abundance of humour, of political and cultural engagement, of stylistic daring and astonishing beauty of language. Like all great literature, these books teem with life, with a profound and celebratory humanity. We have a shortlist of six extraordinary books and we could make a case for each of them as winner, but I want to toast all of them as ¡°winners¡±. Anyone who reads all six of these books would be enriched and delighted, would be awe-struck by the power of story, and encouraged by what literature can do to set our imaginations free,¡± Florence said.

The shortlist was selected from 151 submitted books. It offers an insight into different worlds from the dystopian setting of Gilead, the monologue of an Ohio housewife and the tragicomic tale of a travelling salesman in America; to mostly female, mostly Black, British lives across generations, the trials of a young Nigerian man on a quest to improve his prospects and true allegiances within the brothels of Istanbul.

The four female authors are Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Bernardine Evaristo and Elif Shafak. The two male authors are Chigozie Obioma and Salman Rushdie. The 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019.

Facts about the 2019 shortlisted authors:

SOURCE: THE BOOKER PRIZE FOUNDATION

• Margaret Atwood is shortlisted for The Testaments, the sequel to her 1986 Booker Prize shortlisted The Handmaid¡¯s Tale. Atwood won the 2000 Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin and was also shortlisted for Cat¡¯s Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996) and Oryx and Crake (2003).

• Lucy Ellmann¡¯s Ducks, Newbury Port, if it goes on to win, would be the longest winning novel in the prize¡¯s history at 998 pages. The current longest winning novel is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, in 2013, at 832 pages.
  

• Bernardine Evaristo, shortlisted for Girl, Woman, Other has founded several successful initiatives as a literary activist for inclusion. They include Spread the Word writer development agency (1995¨Congoing); The Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour (2007-2017) and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2012-ongoing).
  

• An Orchestra of Minorities is both Chigozie Obioma¡¯s second novel and second Man Booker / Booker Prize shortlisting. His debut, The Fishermen, was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and its highly acclaimed stage adaption opens today in the West End.
  

• Salman Rushdie, shortlisted for Quichotte, won the 1981 Booker Prize for Midnight¡¯s Children. In 1993 it was judged to be the ¡®Booker of Bookers,¡¯ to mark the 25th anniversary of the prize and in 2008 the ¡®Best of the Booker¡¯ to mark the 40th anniversary. Rushdie was also shortlisted for Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988) and The Moor¡¯s Last Sigh (1995) and longlisted for Shalimar the Clown (2005) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008).
  

• Elif Shafak, shortlisted for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, writes in Turkish and English and is the most widely read female author in Turkey. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better.

The shortlist was chosen by a panel of five judges: founder and director of Hay Festival Peter Florence (Chair); former fiction publisher and editor Liz Calder; novelist, essayist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo; writer, broadcaster and former barrister Afua Hirsch; and concert pianist, conductor and composer Joanna MacGregor.

The 2019 winner will be announced on Monday 14 October at an awards ceremony at London¡¯s Guildhall, one of the highlights of the cultural year. The ceremony will bring together the shortlisted authors and well-known figures from the cultural world.