London (AFP)

The Booker Prize, a prestigious British literary award for 50 years of fiction in English, will be awarded on Monday to one of six nominated writers, including renowned feathers like Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie.

Launched in 1969, the Booker Prize rewards each year the author of the "best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom" of 50,000 books (about 57,200 euros), and ensures it an immediate international notoriety.

Among the six finalists selected this year are four women.

Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, already awarded a Booker Prize, is nominated this time for "The Testaments" ("The Testaments"), the long-awaited sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale", dystopia a terrifying misogynist who has emerged as a true feminist manifesto in the era of the #MeeToo movement.

The president of the jury, Peter Florence, called "The Testaments" a "wild and beautiful novel that speaks to us today with conviction and power". "Atwood has set the bar exceptionally high and is flying," he said.

The book "The Scarlet Servant", published in 1985, became a hit TV series in 2017 that revived sales of the novel, whose English edition reached eight million copies worldwide.

Often quoted for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Margaret Atwood, 79, has already won the Booker Prize in 2000 for her historical novel "The Blind Slayer".

- Roman river -

Winner of the prestigious prize too, in 1981 for "The Children of Midnight", Salman Rushdie, 72, is selected for "Quixote", a modern version of the picaresque epic of the hero of Cervantes transposed in America.

Among the other finalists is Nigerian Chigozie Obioma for the "An Orchestra of Minorities", dedicated to a chicken farmer in a small town in Nigeria. It is "a tale of odyssey proportions that makes the heart beat", according to the jury member Afua Hirsch. The author had already been nominated in 2015.

There is also Anglo-Nigerian Bernardine Evaristo for "Girl, Woman, Other", a chronicle of the lives of black families in Britain.

The American Lucy Ellmann is selected for "Ducks, Newburyport", a 1,000-page river novel built around the monologue of an Ohio housewife, declined in a phrase almost without interruption. The book highlights, according to jury member Joanna MacGregor, the "exasperating complexity of family life".

Finally, Elif Shafak, the most read writer in Turkey, is selected for "10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World", about the memories of a prostitute in the slums of Istanbul.

Until 2013, the Booker Prize was reserved for nationals of the Commonwealth States, before opening the next year to other English-speaking countries.

Besides Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, among the already distinguished novelists are also Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes or Hilary Mantel.

Formerly known as the Man Booker Prize, the prize lost its sponsor in January, the British investment company Man Group wanting to devote its resources to a new campaign for "diversity and inclusion" in the financial sector.

© 2019 AFP