The Best of the Booker award launched

One-off award announced as part of 40th anniversary celebrations

21 February 2008

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.

Victoria Glendinning commented today: ‘The Best of the Booker is a wonderful opportunity to read, or reread, some of the best literature in English of the past four decades. We are having a very good time revisiting the now-classic novels which won the Booker long ago, as well as the celebrated ones from recent years. All readers will enjoy this, and we look forward to hearing what the voters think - and which one, from our shortlist, they will judge the Best of the Booker.’

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.

The winner of the Best of the Booker will be announced at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre in July, accompanied by a series of events debating and celebrating the prize. The winner will be awarded a custom-made trophy.

The full press release is available in the Man Booker Prize Media Centre.

Can’t wait for the Best of the Booker shortlist? Then visitDebate and let us know who you think should make the Best of the Booker shortlist.

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