Booker Prize to Select Best-Ever Winner
Posted on February 21, 2008
The Man Booker Prize is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a Best of the Booker award prize. Judges will pick six finalists from past Booker Prize winners. A public vote will decide the winner. The announcement of who won the Best of the Booker will come this May. Here is more from the Booker Prize press release.
The Best of the Booker, a one-off award, is announced today to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Booker Prize. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction recognises and is awarded for the best novel of the year; and now 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.About the Best of the Booker Judge Chair Victoria Glendinning said, "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."This is only the second time that a celebratory award has been created. The first was in 1993 - the 25th anniversary - when Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight's Children. However, unlike then, this time the public will be able to cast their vote.
In all, 41 novelists have won the prize over the years because in 1974 and 1992 there were two winners. In 1974 Nadine Gordimer won with The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton with Holiday. In 1992 Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient shared the top spot with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.
For The Best of the Booker, a panel of judges has been appointed to select a shortlist of six novels. They are biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, (Chair); 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 via the Man Booker Prize website - www.themanbookerprize.com.
The AP says Yann Martel, Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje are frontrunners for the Best of the Booker award.