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Atwood, Ellmann favorites to win fiction's Booker Prize

Atwood, Ellmann favorites to win fiction's Booker Prize

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Canadian author Margaret Atwood poses for a photograph during a press conference at the British Library to launch her new book 'The Testaments' in London, Tuesday, Sept 10, 2019. Photo: AP

LONDON: Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood is the bookies' favourite to win the coveted fiction trophy again for 'The Testaments,' her follow-up to the dystopian saga 'The Handmaid's Tale.' Atwood, who won in 2000 for 'The Blind Assassin,' is one of six finalists for the 50,000-pound ($63,000) prize, whose winner will be announced Monday. British bookmakers also give strong odds to British-Turkish author Elif Shafak for the Istanbul-set story '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' and US-British writer Lucy Ellmann for her 1,000-page stream-of-consciousness novel 'Ducks, Newburyport.' The other contenders are Salman Rushdie for 'Quichotte,' a modern-day retelling of 'Don Quixote'; Britain's Bernardine Evaristo for 'Girl, Woman, Other'; and Nigeria's Chigozie Obioma for 'An Orchestra of Minorities.' Founded in 1969, the prize is open to English-language authors from any country.