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Atwood, Ellmann favourites to win fiction’s Booker Prize

Oct 14, 2019 | 2:10 AM

LONDON — Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood is the bookies’ favourite to win the coveted fiction trophy again for “The Testaments,” her follow-up to 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 U.S.-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.”