Best Of The Booker Announced

[Stewart]

Rather predictably, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has won the Best Of The Booker award, celebrating forty years of the Booker Prize. Here's the press release:

27 years after its initial publication Midnight's Children is in the news again as it is today (10 July 2008) announced as the winner of the Best of the Booker.

The only time that a celebratory award has previously been created for ‘the Booker' was in 1993 - the 25th anniversary - when Salman Rushdie also won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight's Children.
When voting closed at midday on 8 July, 7801 had voted (via online and SMS) for the six shortlisted Best of the Booker prize titles with 36% voting for Midnight's Children. Votes came in from all around the world with 37% of online votes coming from the UK followed closely by 27% of online voters from North America. At least half of the voters were under 35 with the largest age group ranging between 25-34years, a reflection of the ongoing interest in quality fiction amongst readers of all ages.

The Best of the Booker shortlist was selected by a panel of judges - the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, (Chair); writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan, Professor of English at University College, London.

Victoria Glendinning comments:

'The readers have spoken - in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice.'

Salman Rushdie, in America on tour with his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, was unable to attend the event and instead sent his thanks via a pre-recorded message. His sons, Zafar and Milan, were in attendance at the award ceremony at the Southbank Centre to receive the custom-made trophy.

Salman Rushdie comments:

'Marvellous news! I'm absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight's Children.'

Other celebrations to mark the anniversary include an exhibition in the autumn at the V&A telling the visual story of the prize over its 40 years. The British Council is also working towards the creation of an online collection of contemporary British literature. The Council is in negotiation with publishers to include former winners of the Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize as e-books for a pilot project.

[fausto]

Predictable, maybe, but it seems like a good choice to me.

[Sybarite]

I really must read Midnight's Children.

Oh hell ...

~~surfs on into Amazon and orders it~~

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Sybarite

~~surfs on into Amazon and orders it~~

If you fancy reading all six shortlisted titles, you can get them from The Book People for £12.99

[Sybarite]

Originally Posted by Stewart

If you fancy reading all six shortlisted titles, you can get them from The Book People for £12.99

That is not a bad deal at all – and The Book People are in work on the 21st for a sale.

I've already got Oscar and Lucinda – which I like rather a lot.

[Funhouse]

I voted despite not having read the Farrell or the Gordimer. I thought four out of six would be sufficient. I doubt there would be very many people who had read all six.

And I voted for Salman. I think it was the right choice, much as I admire Barker's, Carey's and Coetzee's novels. Midnight's Children is ultimately a more important novel than the others and will be read and studied in hundreds of years. Coetzee is probably the other writer who stands out in that regard, although possibly not for Disgrace, but instead for his more "timeless" novels like Foe and Waiting for the Barbarians.

Of course, the popular vote is a farce, despite Victoria Glendinning saying that the Booker should be decided that way every year. Rushdie has greater name recognition than the others and the Farrell and Gordimer novels won before the Booker became the popular event it is now, meaning they would have many fewer readers (as in my case), even though they could well be deserving. It's not a level playing field.

I'm in two minds about the number of voters. Part of me thinks they should be embarrassed about the miniscule number when Booker-winning novels usually sell in the hundreds of thousands. But part of me thinks that the low number means more genuine voters rather than half-assed people putting in a vote for a name they've heard of when they haven't read any of the novels in question. Perhaps a vote count in the hundreds of thousands would have raised more doubts.

[Sybarite]

I didn't vote because I didn't feel remotely qualified – haven't read any of the shortlist except the Carey.

But it – and your post, Funhouse – raise an interesting question of how prizes should be decided.

Elsewhere, Eric has talked of prizes as being awarded 'democratically' – is that possible (taking this as an example) or even desirable?

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Sybarite

I didn't vote because I didn't feel remotely qualified – haven't read any of the shortlist except the Carey.

I was in a similar situation, having only read Coetzee's Disgrace, but not recalling much now.

...an interesting question of how prizes should be decided.

I was never quite happy with this prize, which doesn't really achieve anything. Perhaps, going into its fortieth year, the Booker needs a bit of love, and a nostalgic glance over the years, reminds people of a time when they enjoyed the winners, revitalising the prize, especially going into the announcement of the Booker longlist at the end of this month.

I never saw the point of a panel picking a shortlist of six and then letting the public choose from them. Not that I would have let the public pick from all forty-one eligible titles, as Yann Martel's Life Of Pi would undoubtedly have one. In fact, someone on the Man Booker Prize forum suggested it would have been a better idea to let the public vote for the best book and then and over the top six to a panel to decide. At least that way, I'm sure, public tastes would have been better represented. And that's what's needed, as the Booker is a prize that fires public imagination...usually only to knock them down with the eventual winner.

[Sybarite]

It's an interesting idea.

I'd agree that there seems no obvious reason for this particular prize.

I remember thinking that I would be way out of my depth with prize-winning novels: AS Byatt's Possession was probably the first that I read. I bought Carey's Oscar and Lucinda on the back of that, couldn't get into it at all and only picked it up again over a decade later.

So do you think that prizes in general promote literature beyond the usual literature-reading public, Stewart, or possibly put them off?

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Sybarite

So do you think that prizes in general promote literature beyond the usual literature-reading public, Stewart, or possibly put them off?

Prizes do a good job, in my mind, of promoting literature. One only has to look at book covers with things like Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize or Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is a mark of a certain degree of quality that may be the final push a person not au fait with the works needs to seal the purchase.

As long as people don't get too carried away with the eventual winner - after all, someone's got to win - then they are healthy little things. As long as the authors are writing with the book in mind and not the prize carrot, whatever it amounts to.

To that end, it's a shame to see the judges of the Frank O'Connor Award dispense with a shortlist this year and declare Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth as the outright winner. Short stories are a tough enough market as it is without the lesser knowns being given the helping hand of a Shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award tag on the next printing. To this end I agree with Nicholas Lezard, writing on the Guardian blog.

[Eric]

I'm more cynical than most of you. First of all the Booker is already a prize, so the choice is fairly narrow to start with. Then the choice is narrowed down even further by a few stars from the London book establishment (Glendinning, Frostrup, Mullan). Thirdly, the book won the 1993 best of the Booker prize, according to the Wiki. Too much in-crowd adulation for me. Those people who voted may have been from around the globe, but their choice was already severely narrowed before they were given their say.

I think that prizes promote too narrow a section of novels and poetry published. There's too much hype and drooling. Authors whose names get recycled with the label "great" attached are often competent authors, but I never discount all the extraneous factors involved. It's a question of self-fulfilling hype. I don't think the art of "name recognition" should come into it, but it inevitably will.

Eric doesn't want prizes to be awarded "democratically" but knowledgeably, by a broader swathe of readers and literary lecturers from provincial universities for a change, instead of the London TV crowd like Frostrup and Mullan. I realise that Mullan works at UCL, but that rather proves my point about the usual suspects, London, Oxbridge and the Media.

[Sybarite]

Good points, Stewart.

Originally Posted by Eric

... Eric doesn't want prizes to be awarded "democratically" ...

Originally Posted by Eric

... As I have said, trying to maintain equality by positive discrimination, quotas, one-sex prizes, etc., is undemocratic...

Link to post

Since Eric didn't think a literary award for women was fair, and specifically described it (and similar awards) as "undemocratic", it seems fair to deduce that he wants an alternative to this – in other words, for literary prizes to be 'democratic'.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by Sybarite

Good points, Stewart.





Link to post

Since Eric didn't think a literary award for women was fair, and specifically described it (and similar awards) as "undemocratic", it seems fair to deduce that he wants an alternative to this – in other words, for literary prizes to be 'democratic'.

oh snap!

[ions]

Anyone know if there will be another release of the novel to celebrate this? I have yet to read or own this and I'm not really satisfied with the copies available. Wow, that sounds pretentious. But it's true.

[Sybarite]

Originally Posted by ions

Anyone know if there will be another release of the novel to celebrate this? I have yet to read or own this and I'm not really satisfied with the copies available. Wow, that sounds pretentious. But it's true.

~~LOL~~

I'm sure they won't miss such a trick.

On the other hand – the copy that I got, which I ordered the day that the winner was announced, had a sticker on the cover saying that it was one of the shortlisted books.