Did we need two Booker Prize winners?

After six months of reading 151 books longlisted into 11, narrowed down further to six, the Booker Prize judges on October 14 announced this year's winner—the "best novel" produced in English in the UK and Ireland (regardless of the author's nationality) over the past one year. In a startling twist of events—and Prize rules—the 2019 prize would be shared by two authors. Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments. Cue arguments over why, how, and what it entails. More importantly, why should we care?

For the uninitiated: Atwood's Testaments opens 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, a conveniently long enough leap to free it from most of the TV adaptation's plotlines, save for the smuggling of Commander Waterford and his wife's baby Nicole to Canada. The sequel features the cracks appearing in Gilead as handmaids are helped to freedom by the Underground Femaleroad on the one hand, and a hunt for Nicole by the republic on the other. Guiding the reader are three female narrators: Aunt Lydia penning her hidden memoir, Agnes in preparation to marry a commander, and Daisy, a teenager in Canada who recalls being raised like a "prize cat they were cat-sitting". The novel comes in response to the decades of questions about Gilead plaguing Atwood's readers and, like its predecessor, as a stark reflection of the increasingly suffocating world that we inhabit.

Girl, Woman, Other, which shares the prize with Testaments, is a "verse" novel that opens the stage on to 12 British characters scattered across time, most of them women and black. A 10-year-old orphan in Newcastle in 1905. A young bride from Barbados arriving in Cornwill in 1953. A theatre director looking to "Smash The Patriarchy" in 1980 London. A Nigerian grappling with her culture as she adjusts to Oxford University in 2008. The lives are all connected, loosely, by a play that they come into contact with in different capacities across space and time. A professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University in London and an author of eight novels and countless other genre-spanning poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, criticism, radio, and drama, Evaristo wrote this novel specifically to "write black British women into existence" through fiction.

In light of the quality and sheer scope of the two winning novels and their fellow shortlisted contenders, the issue with the Booker decision isn't so much the flouting of the rules. If anything—subjectivity and critical thought being such a vital part of such a decision—the failure of a system to agree unanimously on one work of fiction seems fitting. If you're asking people to read just one book this year—as this award seems to do—asking them to read two seems commendable and almost triumphant.

The issue lies in the more real implications of the award being split two ways, in knowing how much each of the authors "needed" the Prize, and what it will mean for their fiction and its readers.

Even before being shortlisted for the Booker this year, Atwood (already a Booker-winner from 2000 for The Blind Assassin) had sold 103,177 copies within five days of its release. Her publisher Vintage announced it to be the biggest and fastest seller of 2019. As if it weren't already anticipated enough, the book's publicity was further stoked by a "retail error" by Amazon that allowed copies into the hands of some readers before its official release date. As a result, some media platforms were able to read and review the book earlier than others, while smaller and independent bookstores spoke out about the injustice of the debacle on the retail end—Amazon stands to lose little from breaking such an embargo issued by the publishers, but smaller business such as themselves would have suffered a much tougher fate in a similar situation. Alternately, being able to sell The Testaments ahead of time this way would have made a much bigger difference to their businesses than for a giant such as Amazon.  Alongside and even independently of these events, the novel's popularity grows as more and more people subscribe to The Handmaid's Tale's TV show craze, not to mention its growing political relevance in a post-Trump world. All of this means that The Testaments was already smack in the middle of the literary and commercial spotlight. As a sequel to a cult classic, as a sequel to a popular TV show that speaks to our time, and as the latest creative output by Margaret Atwood, a writer being hailed almost as a cultural prophet, the novel would already have been the one book that most dedicated readers would read this year.

Upon receiving the award, Atwood shared in a press conference that she would donate her half of the 50,000 pound prize money to the Canadian Indigenous charity Indspire, and that she is "too old and has too many handbags to spend it on herself", as reported on The Guardian.

In comparison, Evaristo's share of the prize money, as she shared at the same press conference, will go towards paying her mortgage. Although already an esteemed writer, winning the award has opened her book to a much wider international readership than it could have accessed before.

"I've written eight books, but most people haven't read them," she declared laughingly on Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon, the Times Literary Supplement podcast. Now, they ask her "What else have you written?"

Evaristo is also the first black woman and the first black British person to win the Booker prize. This means something beyond just token diversity, particularly given the title, form, and subject matter of her novel. The book's name declares, makes central, and thus officiates a black woman—an "other"—as a valuable presence; its singular form declares her specificity against the stream of forgetfulness and ignorance with which people of colour are treated in the West and women are still treated the world over. By tying this singularity with the voices of 12 characters, by giving them gracious space, in her novel, Evaristo accomplishes an incredibly heroic task.

"The impact on black women and women of colour and marginalised people and black people in this country and perhaps in other places will be huge," she shared on the TLS podcast. Out of the 1,000 or so books published in the UK each year, hers was one out of the two or three books written by and about black women, she pointed out. She further shared, "I've already experienced lot of people being very emotional about this prize—people I know, people in my writing community, people on social media saying they were in tears because I'm a black woman, and also because I'm 60! It's a sign that you can plow ahead decade after decade and then come away with a bit of a gift."

The book and its victory, therefore, means recognition, solidarity, and triumph for a vast demographic of readers both within and outside of the UK who unfortunately still require one among them to write, paint, sing, or photograph them into the public consciousness.

Finally, both for these readers and others, especially those farther away from the UK, the Booker prize sheds light on literature that would otherwise not have been available, simply because it remains undiscovered. For instance, a book like Testaments would have appeared on the shelves here in Bangladesh regardless of its place on the Booker list. Girl, Woman, Other—had it won—would have stood a better chance of gaining currency as "the" Booker winner of the year; now it faces the risk of becoming "that other book that won alongside Atwood". For us, in a country that is already reluctant to widen its reading tastes beyond our fantasy, YA, romance, thriller, and classic favourites, one where most bookstores are forced to only order books that they know are already in popular demand just to stay afloat, the discovery of books like Girl, Woman, Other—more experimental and less traditionally South Asian or white Western-oriented—are especially vital. If only because they're so rare. One really hopes that Evaristo's works surf through these waves and reach all the eyes that they deserve, as have those of Atwood. Some of us are happy to read two, or even six or 11 or 25 of the best books produced in a year. But how many others do the same?

Sarah Anjum Bari can be reached at sarah.anjum.bari@gmail.com