London: India-born authors Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy would be among those vying for the 'The Best
of the Booker', a one-off award to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prestigious literary prize.
The Best of the Booker will honour the finest novel to have won the The Man Booker Prize for Fiction since it was first awarded on April 22, 1969, the organisers announced on Thursday
In all, 41 novels will be eligible for the award, including Rushdie's Midnight Children, Roy's The God of Small
Things and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.
This is the second time that a celebratory award has been
created by the Man Booker prize organisers. In 1993 - the
25th anniversary - Rushdie won the 'Booker of Bookers' for
Midnight's Children.
The Best of the Booker will, for the first time, invite the public to help decide which novel deserves to take this prestigious one-off award. The public will choose from a short-list of six novels to be selected by a panel of judges chaired by novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning.
The two other judges on the panel are writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and Professor John Mullan, who teaches English literature at University College London.
Their short-list will be announced in May, and public
voting will then begin here on the Man Booker Prize website.
"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" said Glendinning.
"All readers will enjoy this, and we look forward to hearing what the voters think - and which one, from our short-list, they will judge the Best of the Booker."
The winner of the Best of the Booker will be announced at
the London Literature Festival in July, accompanied by a
series of events debating and celebrating the prize. The
winner will be awarded a custom-made trophy.
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