The judges staged a ‘joyful mutiny’ to name the pair joint winners of the literary prize. And that’s not all that unites them

It was clear that things were not going to plan when, just half an hour before the guests began to arrive, the judges of this year’s Booker prize had yet to make a decision. Five hours after they had begun their deliberations, they finally emerged in a state of “joyful mutiny” to announce that they had decided to break with convention, throw out the rule book and anoint two winners rather than the usual one.

By happy coincidence, Bernardine Evaristo is the same age that Margaret Atwood was when, in 2000, she first won the Booker prize with The Blind Assassin. “And I’m happy that we’ve both got curly hair,” quipped Atwood as they took to the stage arm in arm. They talk about it again the following morning, comparing notes about hair etiquette and handy products for curls. They agree that it is a political issue. “People used to review my hair back in the day,” says Atwood.

At first glance, the two prizewinning novels seem worlds apart. Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic look at the lives of 12 black British women that spans the past 100 years, while Atwood’s The Testaments plunges us back into Gilead, the totalitarian state she created in 1985, when Evaristo was a radical lesbian theatremaker still in her 20s. Did the younger woman read The Handmaid’s Tale when it first came out?

“Obviously I knew about it, because lots of women around me had read it,” says Evaristo, “but I didn’t read it until the late 90s because I was reading African American women in my 20s, as they were the ones who I needed to read: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde. They’re the ones who spoke to me. But when I did read it, I just thought it was a fantastic, chilling story. And so powerfully feminist.”

Both winning novels continue that feminist tradition, though both could also be seen to contain critiques of it. In The Testaments, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, women are oppressed by women – notably the scary Aunt Lydia – while in Girl, Woman, Other, the teenage Yazz dismisses her mother as a feminazi: “To be honest, even being a woman is passé these days,” she sneers.

Both authors laugh: “So, yeah, she’s a teenager,” says Evaristo. “Of course she has to counter the mom,” agrees Atwood. “And, in fact, the same thing happened in The Handmaid’s Tale back in 1985. Offred has this feminist mom of the 60s and 70s who she considers really extreme and passé, and her mother keeps saying: ‘Just you wait.’”

Yazz’s mother is Amma, who is a theatremaker, as Evaristo once was. We meet the character on the eve of her big success – a premiere of her play The Last Amazon of Dahomey, at the National Theatre – but the novel traces her back to a 1980s London of squats and lesbian collectives. How autobiographical is it all?

“She’s a version of my younger self,” confirms Evaristo. “I wanted to write about that 1980s era of, particularly, black women feminists who were creating art together, who felt like outsiders in society and who were very brave and also very confrontational – you know, because that was a very confrontational era. I used to heckle; Amma heckles. And Amma is lesbian. And I was lesbian in the 80s.

“A lot of the women creating theatre and art and dance and so on were lesbian or bisexual and working in a quite segregated way, but feeling empowered by each other – not having to explain themselves to other people, not feeling that they needed to bring men in. Then, I think, a lot of people reach a stage where they no longer need that; and also sexuality changes; my own sexuality changed.”

Evaristo was the fourth of eight children born to an English mother and a Nigerian father in south-east London in 1959. Although Atwood grew up in Canada 20 years earlier and spent her early childhood running wild during field trips with her entomologist father, there are similarities in their upbringings, not least in the traditional attitudes to gender in schools. “In the 50s and early 60s, girls took home economics, boys took woodwork and never the twain would meet,” says Atwood. “That’s the education I had. But, since I grew up in the woods and had a tomboy mother, who was not interested in those things at all, it didn’t take on me.” Evaristo says: “I went to a girls grammar school and did domestic science, and my brothers did woodwork or whatever they called it.”

Both women grew up in the heydey of the nuclear family, and their novels are an examination of less conventional families. In Gilead nobody is brought up by their birth mother, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t mothered, while Evaristo creates all sorts of domestic set-ups. “I have a gay man and a gay woman who raise a child separately; they’re not living together. I wanted to present a sort of queer family,” she says. “Amma has a support network around her; she chooses lots of people to be godparents so that she always has babysitters, for example.

“But,” she adds, ” in the black British community, there is a small problem with single-parent families-women raising children on their own. I have one woman in the book who is raising her children on her own because her man is leaving. But I also have a few nuclear families.”

The nuclear family, Atwood chips in, was part of the burden of the 20th century. “In the nineteenth century, families were greatly expanded. And then it became nuclear, which was actually very difficult for women because they had to be in that house by themselves with their Hoover and their washing machine. And that should have been enough, but it meant they had no support.

“So I think the extended families and families you make, rather than the ones you’re handed on a plate, give people a lot more support. And, for example, if you go into indigenous societies, you will find much more generational support. So grandmothers and elders are very important.”

Which brings us to the role of older women in novels. Aunt Lydia is hardly a positive role model, agrees Etude, “but all the occupying forces are raising a contingent of internally oppressed people to do control because it’s more efficient and much cheaper. Therefore, of course, they will raise the contingent of women. This has been the case throughout colonial history. As I said, nothing went into a book that has no precedent in real life. Someone reading the original handmaid’s tale once said, “This book was just like my girls’ school. Well, they’re nuns, you know …”

In the world of Evaristo, three of the strongest and sweetest women are elderly. “I really wanted to write a novel between generations, and have women at every stage in their lives. I wanted them all to have their abilities intact and be, to a certain extent, enjoying their lives and enjoying their independence.

“Older women don’t really do much in fiction, which is such a shame because we’re actually much more interesting than younger women because we’ve lived life to the fullest. But when young women write to older women, they tend to be crazy!

Atwood nods. “When I came to the U.S. right after trump’s election, these young women were saying,” This is the worst thing that’s ever happened.” No. No. A lot of worse things have happened.

“I’m also saying that if your heart is broken when you’re 18, by 28, you have some perspective; at 38, you probably think it’s funny. And when you’re my age, you can’t remember who it was that broke your heart.

Which brings both writers to their own ages. “Am I middle-aged now?”Wonders Evaristo, who was at the Booker ceremony with her husband, whom she met on a Dating site 13 years ago. “You know —” she muses — ” there’s a myth that old people don’t have energy. I think if you take care of yourself, you have energy.”

“In fact,” adds Atwood, “you often have more energy because it doesn’t go into what it goes into when you’re younger, such as” – she bursts into a loud whisper – “hormonal changes every month. There’s a mid-period when you take care of everyone – your kids, your parents – and you’re really stretched. Then as you get older, bad things happen, people die, but you don’t care to that extent anymore.”

Role models are key, says Evaristo. “It’s good for young women to see older women who lead fulfilling lives. I had a friend who was in her 90s who was a motion mentor at my drama school. And she was still teaching in the late ‘ 80s, working in Europe and giving seminars. And she always had plans.

“It was so important for me to show that aging is something to be welcomed and enjoyed. Because what can you do about it? I know that sounds really idealistic, but that’s what I’m trying to tell myself, especially now that I’m 60.”

The forms that both women have chosen to Express all these themes are also energetic. “Well,” Atwood says dryly, ” when you have totalitarianism, you’re going to have a lot of plot because totalitarianism generates conspiracies. And I don’t just mean the plot of the novel.”

Evaristo writes in a style she calls ” fusion fiction.” “I wanted to tell 12 women’s stories, so I had to find a form to fit that. It’s kind of patterned on the page, a bit like poetry, and there were very few full stops, but there are gaps between the lines that indicate some sort of breathing spaces. It allowed me to write every woman’s story in a way that was in their heads and outside. And go back to the past and forward to the present.”

Although she hasn’t written a play since the 80s, Evaristo acknowledges the impact of theater on her work and says she hopes to return to it. When I wonder what impact the TV adaptation of the handmaid’s Tale had on Atwood’s work, Evaristo points out that the variety of quotas in the cast literally changed Gilead’s complexion. We also know that the series “the handmaid’s Tale” introduced the character of the missing child Nicole, whose film is a Central mystery in the covenants.

Atwood disagrees: “There was a lot of discussion about the series that they didn’t go all pigs – because they would then send all black people to national homelands, as South Africans did during apartheid. Probably North Dakota. I don’t know what you know about North Dakota, but it’s an inhospitable place to have a national homeland.”

Does television change what people say? “It changes the way stories are viewed,” says Atwood. “It’s not like radio, where you can’t actually tell what color a person is. If the handmaid’s Tale had been on the radio, it wouldn’t have worked. You wouldn’t have all these protesters dressed as maids. It’s very visual .”

“Yes,” says Evaristo, “I think in terms of TV drama and stage drama, cross-casting, as they call it, was incredible. Especially in recent years. For example, Ajoa Andoh, a friend of mine, recently played Richard II at the Globe.

Both novels end on a note of optimism. Does this reflect the writers ‘ own views. “What we think is how the family has changed,” says Atkins. “It’s been a big struggle in North America and especially for gay people. But in Canada, we have same-sex marriage now.”

Evaristo shakes his head. “I think we overdo it in difficult political times. I tend to have a very positive Outlook on everything. But, at the moment, it’s very difficult for me to have a positive view of the political climate in this country, let alone anywhere else.

“But with the characters, I don’t want to imagine 12 black women who are defeated by life, although that’s sometimes the case. So there is certainly hope in each of his stories without him getting saccharin.”

Atwood agrees: “a Pessimistic end would be you killing evse. The end of the Covenants is not optimistic for everyone in history, but it signals the beginning of the end. Or, as Churchill said, ” It’s not over. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But this, perhaps, is the end of the beginning. Maybe at the end of the beginning is optimistic enough in these circumstances.”

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