Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won Booker

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children looks set to win the Best of Booker prize in the ultimate accolade for an author whose post-colonial prose on independent India has transfixed a generation, enabled the empire to write a back and won a slew of awards.

The Best of Booker award, to be presented at the London literary festival in July, will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize. It will be the first time a winner has been chosen from a shortlist by public vote.

In Rushdie, who is up against five other shortlist authors ranging from the towering J.M Coetzee to Nadine Gordimer, who were to win, it would make Midnight’s Children the greatest Booker-Prize-winning novel of all time. It would be the third time Rushdie has been honored by the Booker for the same novel, having won the actual prize in 1981 and receiving the Booker of Bookers in 1993, when the Prize marked its 25th anniversary.
Interestingly, VS Naipaul has been left off the shortlist despite winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

It is seen to be measure of Rushdie’s triumph that he heads a heavyweight shortlist that notably fails to feature of some 20th century’s foremost writers, including Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. The shortlist is seen to have a distinctly post-colonial tinge with five linked to Empire, not least JG Farell’s 1973 novel The Siege of Krishnapur, which is set in 1850s India.

The shortlist also includes Gordimer’s The Conservationist, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road and Coetzee’s Disgrace.

But it is Rushdie’s inclusion on the shortlist that has excited the most interest with the reliable indicator of Public mood - the British bookmaker – installing him as the favorite, with Barker, Carey, Coetzee, Gordmer and Farell following in that order with ever-longer odds. The judges who drew up the shortlist from some of the most revered Booker-winning novels of the last 40 years, said Rushdie was a natural for this ultimate honor because he won the original prize “for what his fans or detractors would think of as his best book…it has an ebullience and a brilliance.”

But the shortlist has not been universally well received with some critics complaining that it is heavy with novels that are now literary history and fails to include recent popular winning titles such as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.