The author of the Booker Prize Winner 2019 book "Girl, Women, Other" is

Question

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Correct — D, Bernardine Evaristo (the paper prints 'Bernadine'). Her novel 'Girl, Woman, Other' won the Booker Prize for 2019, and with it she became the first black woman to win the Booker. The 2019 prize was unusual in one specific way that the question quietly depends on: the jury, chaired by Peter Florence, refused to separate two books and split the award, so the 2019 Booker was shared between Evaristo for 'Girl, Woman, Other' and Margaret Atwood for 'The Testaments'. That breached the prize's own rule, in force since 1993, that the award may not be divided. Because both winners appear in the option list, the only thing that decides the question is the book named in the stem — 'Girl, Woman, Other' is Evaristo's, so the answer is (d) and not (a).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The sharpest distractor in the paper, and a half-right one. Atwood did win the Booker Prize for 2019 — jointly with Evaristo — but for 'The Testaments', her sequel to 'The Handmaid's Tale', not for 'Girl, Woman, Other'. At 79 she was the oldest winner in the prize's history. A candidate who remembers 'Atwood won the 2019 Booker' and stops reading the stem loses the mark here.  (b) Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist who writes in both English and Turkish and was much discussed in the 2019 literary season, but she is not the author of 'Girl, Woman, Other' and did not win the 2019 Booker Prize.  (c) Rushdie's Booker is a much older one — he won in 1981 for 'Midnight's Children', which was later voted the best of all the winners in the prize's anniversary polls. He did not write 'Girl, Woman, Other' and was not a 2019 winner. His name is included precisely because 'Booker' and 'Rushdie' sit together in most students' memory.

Concept: The Booker Prize is the leading award for a novel written in English. Its eligibility rule has changed twice in ways worth knowing: until 2013 it was open only to writers from the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe, and from 2014 it opened to any novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Its sponsor also changed — the Man Group's sponsorship, which gave the world the name 'Man Booker Prize' from 2002, ended in 2019, after which the award reverted to being called simply the Booker Prize. A separate International Booker Prize honours a book translated into English, with the money split equally between author and translator.

State PCS 2019 Q78 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q78 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer