RU sent us this announcement:
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced today (Thursday 21 February) a one-off award – The Best of the Booker – to celebrate the prestigious literary prize’s 40th anniversary. The Best of the Booker will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969. 41 novels will be eligible for the award as there were two winners in both 1974 and in 1992.
This is the second time that a celebratory award has been created by the prize. In 1993 – the 25th anniversary – Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers with the 1981 winning novel Midnight’s Children following the decision by a judging panel which included Malcolm Bradbury, David Holloway and WL Webb.
The Best of the Booker will, for the first time, be inviting the public to help decide on which novel deserves to take this prestigious one-off award. The public will choose from a shortlist of six novels to be selected by a panel judges chaired by Victoria Glendinning. The two other judges on the panel are writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL. Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting will then begin here on the Man Booker Prize website.
Here are the odds:
Bookmakers William Hill has listed Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as favourite to win the Best of the Booker at odds of 4/1. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children runs a close second at 5/1 and Ondaatje’s English Patient just behind that at 7/1.
Ladbrokes has Salman Rushdie in the lead with Midnight’s Children at 4/1, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient at 6/1 and in joint third Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin at 7/1.
Please please please please please…don’t let it be Life of Pi. Midnight’s Children already won Best of the Booker in 1993. (If it won again, would it be Best of the Best of the Booker? Bestest of the Booker?) Either English Patient or Sacred Hunger would be excellent choices. But what about Disgrace, or Amsterdam…argh, too many to choose from!
Here’s a complete list of past winners — decide for yourself. The Best of the Booker winner will be announced in July.
Filed under: authors, awards, books, reading Tagged: | Best of the Booker, Man Booker Prize
