The jurors of the Booker Prize have unveiled the first list of thirteen candidates selected to win the literary prize and the most famous of Great Britain. Margaret Atwood could well be the future recipient of the award, for The Wills , the second volume of The Handmaid’s tale . The Canadian had already obtained in 2000, with his work The Killer Blind (The Blind Assassin ). Created in 1969, the Booker Prize is a literary award, the most prestigious, and only those fictions written in English language are selected.
The handmaid’s tale, a worldwide success
Margaret Atwood, published in 1985, The Handmaid”s Tale, ( The Handmaid’s tale , in French). It is a novel dystopian imagining a dictatorship called Gilead, where fertile women, the Handmaids of scarlet, such as the heroine, June, embodied on the screen by Elisabeth Moss, are forced to have sex with powerful men to arrest the fall in the birth rate. Number one in sales in the United States in January last, the work is up to 320.000 copies.
Its adaptation into a tv series has won multiple awards, including eight awards to Emmy Awards. The sequel to the first novel is therefore eagerly awaited and will be published in English in September, then in November in france.
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The Wills recounts, through three narrators, the continued adventures of Offred, handmaid to a red dress, reduced to the role of maker of the child in the Republic dictatorial, fifteen years later. If there is little evidence about the narrative, the novelist, however, has said it wants to build on the current political climate, including the policy of Donald Trump and his new restrictions on the right of women in certain us states: “Dear readers: for this book, I found my inspiration in all the questions that you have asked me through the years over Gilead and its internal workings. Finally, almost all of them! My other source of inspiration, it is the world in which we live”.
The political crisis at the heart of the novels
If the jury has called The Wills of the “terrifying and exhilarating”, the competition promises to be muscular. It will have to do battle with a number of novels inspired by the political crises of the present. In The Wall , John Lanchester imagine a wall of 10,000 miles erected around Britain in order to protect migrants. Valeria Luiselli, writer in mexico, author of Lost Children Archive attaches to the scandals regarding the children separated from their parents at the border american-mexican.
The winner will receive the sum of 50,000 pounds (almost 56 000 euros) as well as a special edition of his book. A second selection will take place on 3 September, to define the six finalists. The ultimate result will be release on October 14.
