[bbc.com, 10 minutes ago] Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo have been named the joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize after the judges broke the rules by declaring a tie.

Atwood’s The Testaments, the Canadian writer’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, was recognised alongside Londoner Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other.

The pair will split the literary award’s £50,000 prize money equally.

The Booker rules say the prize must not be divided, but the judges insisted they “couldn’t separate” the two works.

The rules were changed after the last tie in 1992, and organisers told this year’s judges they were not allowed to pick two winners. But after five hours of deliberations, Peter Florence, the chair of the judges, said: “It was our decision to flout the rules.”

He told reporters: “The more we talked about them, the more we found we loved them both so much we wanted them both to win.”