Best of the Booker Award
Celebrating 40
years of the Man Booker Prize
by Liz Olson
In honor of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction’s
40th anniversary, a one-time award—Best of the
Booker—was awarded in 2008. The award honours the best novel to have
won the prize since it was first awarded 22 April 1969. Forty-one novels are
eligible for the prize because there were two winners in 1974 and 1992.
A short-list of six novels was chosen by a judging panel that had
Victoria Glendinning as the chairwoman. The short-listed books included
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, J M Coetzee's
Disgrace, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, The Siege of
Krishnapur by J G Farrell, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, and
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker.
The public was asked to
participate in choosing a winner by voting for their choice of the six
novels. The top three favourites to win were Yann Martel’s Life of
Pi, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and
Ondaatje’s English Patient.
Salman Rushdie and his novel,
Midnight’s Children, won the Best of the Booker Award, which
was announced at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre in
July. Rushdie’s Midnight Children won the Man Booker Prize in
1981 and was also chosen as the Booker of Bookers in 1993.
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