BRITAIN: 'Midnight's Children'has again been voted Booker of Bookers, writes Eileen Battersby
DESTINED APPARENTLY to be forever honoured, at least by Booker, for his 1981 Booker Prize-winning second novel Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (61) has again won the Booker of Bookers.
Announced yesterday in London at the South Bank Festival of Literature, Rushdie's latest prize adds to the Booker of Bookers he won in 1993. That Booker of Bookers was awarded to the novel considered to be the finest book to have won the prize during its then 25-year history.
15 years on, the Man Booker Prize (as it is now known) is marking 40 years. This new Booker of Bookers is a further variation on the 1993 award in that it has been decided by a public poll.
A shortlist of six previous winners was agreed by a panel of three judges and put to a public e-mail vote. It included two South African Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, the first writer to win the prize twice.
Also included was the second double-Booker winner Peter Carey, Pat Barker and JG Farrell, who won in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, the year before Gordimer shared the prize with Stanley Middleton.
More than 7,000 readers participated, with 37 per cent favouring Rushdie's book.
Three Bookers for one work is impressive and confirms that the novel has retained its status.
Originally, Rushdie's win from a strong shortlist in 1981 was not without controversy. His fellow contenders that year included Muriel Spark, Irish writer Molly Keane and Doris Lessing as well as the then emerging Ian McEwan. While the popular vote looked to Keane, many commentators favoured DM Thomas with The White Hotel.
Two years later Rushdie, who was born in Bombay in 1947 and moved to England in 1961, was again shortlisted, this time for Shame, but the prize went to JM Coetzee's magnificent parable, Life Times of Michael K.
In 1988, Rushdie was again short-listed, this time for a work that would stalk him, The Satanic Verses. The winner was Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda.
Flash forward seven years and Rushdie received his fourth shortlisting, this time for The Moor's Last Sigh.
Since its publication, Midnight's Children- a magic realist narrative which begins with the birth of Saleem Sinai, who is "handcuffed to history" and to India, in a dazzling performance that shows the influence of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum - has overshadowed each of Rushdie's books, with the exception of Shame.
Indian fiction is among the strongest of contemporary literary traditions and many fine writers have emerged since Rushdie stepped out of the shadow of VS Naipaul.
The Man Booker Prize enjoys a high profile and its publicity machine consistently devises ways to ensure that this continues. But perhaps it would have been more fun to have asked the public to nominate its own shortlist.
The long list for this year's Man Booker Prize will be announced next month.