Booker prize: Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' sequel makes 2019 shortlist

Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s The Testament has made it to the Booker Prize shortlist.

Six books were selected from the long-list of 13. "Like all great literature, these books teem with life, with a profound and celebratory humanity,"  jury chair Peter Florence said at the press conference announcing the shortlist.

This is the sixth Booker nomination for the Canadian author, who won the £50,000 literary prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.

Here is the 2019 Booker prize shortlist:

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood 

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann 

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo 

An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma 

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie 

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak 

The 2019 winner will be announced on October 14.

The Testaments is a sequel to Atwood's best-selling dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which has also been adapted into a hit TV series by streaming service Hulu.

The Handmaid’s Tale, a bleak vision of a near future in an American society called Gilead where women are banned from reading and writing, have their children taken away from them, and are forced into sexual servitude by a patriarchal dictatorship, was first published in 1985.

The Testaments is set 15 years after the events depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale and narrated by three female characters, according to Atwood. 

The book is due to be published in September 2019 by Penguin Random House, a division of Germany’s Bertelsmann.