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Booker Prize Twinning

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Bernardine Evaristo: I hated Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, says Booker winner

Bernardine Evaristo, right, and Margaret Atwood were joint winners
Bernardine Evaristo, right, and Margaret Atwood were joint winners
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid, Jane Austen wrote.
But as this year’s joint Booker Prize winner would no doubt say, what if that novel is just not very good?
Bernardine Evaristo has confessed to loathing Pride and Prejudice, the Austen classic that in various polls has been voted the nation’s favourite novel.
Evaristo, who on Monday became the first black woman to win the prestigious literary prize, said she realised she may get into trouble for taking an axe to one of English literature’s sacred cows. Indeed, for taking an axe to two of them. She is also no fan of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

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