Margaret Atwood among favourites to win fiction's Booker Prize

Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood is the bookies' favourite to win the coveted fiction trophy again for The Testaments, her follow-up to dystopian saga The Handmaid's Tale.

Atwood, who won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, is one of six finalists for the 50,000-pound ($83,000 Cdn) prize, whose winner will be announced Monday.

British bookmakers also give strong odds to British-Turkish author Elif Shafak for the Istanbul-set story 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and U.S.-British writer Lucy Ellmann for her 1,000-page stream-of-consciousness novel Ducks, Newburyport.

The other contenders are Salman Rushdie for Quichotte, a modern-day retelling of Don Quixote; Britain's Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other; and Nigeria's Chigozie Obioma for An Orchestra of Minorities.

Founded in 1969, the prize is open to English-language authors from any country.