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Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been named the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize after the judges broke their rules by declaring a tie.

The Booker Prize has been jointly awarded twice before, to Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton in 1974 and to Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth in 1992. In 1993, the rules were changed so that only one author could win the prize. This is the first time since then that two authors have been announced as joint-winners. The 2019 winners will share the £50,000 prize money.

It is the second time that Atwood has won the Booker Prize, having won in 2000 with The Blind Assassin. She has been shortlisted for four further books: The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Cat’s Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996) and Oryx and Crake (2003). 

At 79, Atwood is now the oldest-ever writer to take home the Booker. She first claimed the coveted prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, and several of her works have made the shortlist in the past. Already a giant of contemporary literature, Atwood has enjoyed a commercial hit with The Testaments, which sold 125,000 copies in the United States during the first week after its release and boasted the best opening-day sales of any book in 2019, according to the Washington Post’s Ron Charles.

Evaristo, a 60-year-old Anglo-Nigerian author based in London, has been writing for nearly 40 years, but she is better-known in Britain than on the international stage. Speaking with the Times following her win, Evaristo said she wrote Girl, Woman, Other in response to a lack of representation in British literature: “When I started the book six years ago, I was so fed up with black British women being absent from British literature,” she explained. “So I wanted to see how many characters I could put into a novel and pull it off.”

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Pixar's "Soul" is about a jazz pianist who has a near-death experience and gets stuck in the afterlife, contemplating his choices and regretting the existence that he mostly took for granted. Pixar veteran Pete Docter is the credited co-director, alongside playwright and screenwriter Kemp Powers, who wrote Regina King's outstanding "One Night in Miami." Despite its weighty themes, the project has a light touch. A musician might liken "Soul" to an extended riff, or a five-finger exercise, which is very much in the spirit of jazz, an improvisation-centered art that's honorably and accurately depicted onscreen whenever Joe or another musician character starts to perform. 

“Soul” won the Academy Award for animated feature at the 2021 Oscars on Sunday night, making it the 11th film from the storied animation studio to take the prize since the category was created in 2002.

Directed by Pete Docter, “Soul” tells the story of Joe Gardner, a middle school music teacher with aspirations to be a professional jazz musician. After his excitement at landing a gig leads to an accident, Joe’s soul is determined to figure out a way to get back to his body on Earth instead of accepting his death and heading to the great beyond.

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While television and web series run for weeks together (divided into 30 to 40 minute-long episodes), films are usually no longer than two hours. However, Swedish filmmakers Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson challenged this practice in their film by making it 857 hours long. Imagine sitting through such a long film!

What's it about

An experimental film, "Logistics" lacks any conventional structure. It follows the life cycle of a pedometer, a tiny plastic electronic device used by people to count their steps and monitor their pulse rate. The film follows the pedometer's journey in reverse chronological order. It begins at a store in Stockholm, where the pedometer is sold and then traces it back to a factory in China's Bao'an distict, where it was manufactured.

What makes it special?

The film is shot in real time over 37 days and 37 nights, nonstop. This helps the viewers understand the actual time and distance taken by the product to reach from China to Sweden.

To get a first-hand experience, the filmmakers travelled with the product as it made its way aboard a large container ship going from Sweden to China, a freight train to the port of Gothenburg, then a truck to the port of Shenzhen and a factory in Bao'an.

It offers a peek into the realities of online shopping and global logistics. The film was exhibited in Stockholm in 2012.

Since it would be difficult to sit through such a long film, "Logistics" has been broken down into short, two-minute clips - one for each day of the journey on its website. You can watch it on logisticsartproject.com.

Did you know?

Longest films in the world

• "Ambiance": Another Swedish film "Ambiance", which was scheduled to release in 2020, is 720 hours long, which is equivalent to a whopping 30 days. The film's trailer, which came out in April 2016, was seven hours and twenty minutes long!
• "Hamlet": Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" released in 1996 lasts 242 minutes.
• "Cleopatra": Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1963 film "Cleopatra" is 248 minutes long.

Longest films in India

• "Doon School Quintet" is a documentary series created by American visual anthropologist. It has a runtime of more than eight hours (494 minutes)
• "Czechmate", a documentary by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur runs for 448 minutes (roughly seven and a half hours.)
• "LOC Kargil": The 2003 film "LOC Kargil", based on the Kargil War and directed by J.P. Dutta is four hours and fifteen minutes long.

Picture Credit : Google