Joint honoursMargaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo both win the Booker prize

IT WAS NOT meant to happen. The rules clearly state that the Booker prize, given to the best novel written in English each year, “may not be divided or withheld”. Yet on October 14th a panel of judges announced that Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo would share the accolade—and the £50,000 ($62,700) prize money—for “The Testaments” and “Girl, Woman, Other”. In the end, the judges said, they “couldn’t separate” the two novels: hours of deliberation and taking of votes “didn’t work”.

Ms Atwood was the favourite to win from a shortlist of six, with bookmakers offering odds of 2/1 ahead of the announcement. “The Testaments”, a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), had been hailed as “the publishing event of the year” and enjoyed a lavish publicity campaign. The book had been optioned for television by Hulu and MGM even before its release on September 10th. It sold more than 100,000 copies in Britain in its first week; Waterstones, a retailer, said that it has been the fastest-selling book in their stores this year.

“The Testaments” returned to the dystopian world Ms Atwood created in its predecessor, where the United States government has been overthrown by an extremist Christian group. In Gilead, a theocratic totalitarian state, men and women are forced into strict roles; women are forbidden from having jobs, owning property or even reading. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is the testimony of Offred, who is made to bear the children of a high-ranking officer, and it depicted the regime in its ascendancy. “The Testaments”, set more than 15 years later, is narrated by three different characters (two of whom do not appear in the original novel). It elaborated upon the inner workings of Gilead, and depicted a state riven by internal divisions.

Having won the Booker in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin”, a complex work of historical fiction, Ms Atwood becomes the fourth writer to have claimed the prize twice. Some critics have argued that crowning “The Testaments” was a way for the judges to retrospectively acknowledge the political and cultural importance of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, which was shortlisted for the prize in 1986 but lost out to Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”. Speaking at a press conference after the announcement, Ms Atwood remarked that she was relieved to share this year’s award, for “it would have been quite embarrassing for a person of my age and stage to have won the whole thing and thereby hinder a person in an earlier stage of their career from going through that door”.

Ms Evaristo is by no means new to the profession—“Girl, Woman, Other” is her eighth novel—and her writing has a muscular, assured confidence. But carpers think splitting the award overshadows Ms Evaristo’s achievement, and the fact that she is the first black woman to win the prize. “Girl, Woman, Other” tells the stories of 12 characters who, in the past century, have made Britain their home. There is a young orphan who grows up in Newcastle in the early 1900s dreaming of her Abyssinian father, who sailed away on a merchant ship never knowing that she had been conceived. There is a young bride from Barbados who settles in Cornwall in the 1950s, grappling with racial prejudice while trying to make friends and raise her family. There is a young woman, born in the 1990s, who wonders whether she should really have been born a man. Seemingly unconnected, these disparate characters gradually come together; Ms Evaristo traces the arcs of these lives while probing the many meanings of the “other”. “Girl, Woman, Other” is a warm, humorous and ambitious novel, and one that is enjoyably playful in style. It is both a product of its time and unlike any book ever written about Britain.

In the wake of the announcement, booksellers were hopeful that Ms Evaristo would receive the same popularity boost enjoyed by previous winners of one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. (They added that the prize was unlikely to affect Ms Atwood’s already enormous sales.) Last year Faber printed hundreds of thousands more copies of “Milkman”, Anna Burns’s novel, in the month after its win; publishing rights were sold in 23 international territories. Ms Evaristo has said that winning has already been “a real game-changer”, and that it will have a wider effect. “There are lots of prizes which people from certain communities don’t win, certainly black people don’t win lots of literary awards,” she said. “Hopefully this signals a new direction for the Booker and the kind of judges they have.”