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The Best of Booker race is on, with a role for the public

London: India-born authors Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai will be among those vying for ‘The Best of the Booker,’ a one-off award to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the literary prize.

It will honour the finest novel to have won 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. They include Rushdie’s Midnight Children, Arundhati Roy’s 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 year, Rushdie won the ‘Booker of Bookers’ for Midnight’s Children.

The Best of the Booker will, for the first time, give the public an opportunity to help decide the deserving novel, choosing from a shortlist of six novels. The shortlist is to be made by a panel of judges chaired by novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning and including writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and Professor of English at University College London John Mullan.

The shortlist will be announced in May. The public voting will then begin on the Man Booker Prize website.

Ms. Glendinning said on Thursday: “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.”

The winner will be announced at the London Literature Festival in July. — PTI

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