`Blind Assassin' finally wins Booker for Margaret Atwood

MARGARET ATWOOD won the Booker Prize last night, finally claiming the most prestigious fiction award in the world after being shortlisted three times previously.

The choice of the hugely regarded Canadian author was widely welcomed in the literary world, where there has been bewilderment that she has not won before.

Her book The Blind Assassin, her 10th novel, was described by the journalist Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the judges, as "demonstrating Atwood's immense emotional range as well as her poet's eye for both telling detail and psychological truth. It demonstrates the mature pessimism of age and does so brilliantly."

Atwood, who was born in 1939, is understood to have won convincingly after a one-hour judges' meeting. Mr Jenkins said the choice was "overwhelming" though not unanimous. After receiving the pounds 21,000 prize, Margaret Atwood said she would give the money towards saving endangered animals.

Then she displayed a typical and typically elegant ambivalence in her attitude to prizes. She said: "When you go to heaven and arrive at the pearly gates, St Peter is going to ask you what you have written and not how many prizes you have on the mantelpiece. It is very nice to win the Booker but you can not win it and go on, as I have proved."

The other shortlisted authors were Trezza Azzopardi, Michael Collins, Kazuo Ishiguro, Matthew Kneale and Brian O'Doherty. The judges were Simon Jenkins, Professor Roy Foster of Oxford University, the television presenter Mariella Frostrup, Caroline Gascoigne, literary editor of The Sunday Times, and the novelist Rose Tremain.

Success at the fourth time of asking, page 9

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