27 years past 'Midnight'
Salman Rushdie just won what is surely one of the odder book prizes: the "Best of the Booker" competition. Marking the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, formerly known simply as the Booker, the foundation that gives the prize held a sort of public election for readers to choose their favorite of all previous winners. The winner was Rushdie's "Midnight's Children," which won the prestigious British prize in 1981.
Rushdie has been considered a likely winner in recent years, for subsequent books, but has never won again, so this is a sort of an extra pat on the back. He won the same honor in 1993, on the prize's 25th anniversary. Although the winner was chosen by public vote, a panel of judges made the shortlist for the voters to choose from. It included: Pat Barker's "The Ghost Road" (1995), Peter Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda" (1988), J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" (1999), Nadine Gordimer's "The Conservationist" (1974), and J.G. Farrell's "The Siege of Krishnapur" (1973).
It's hard to imagine such a thing happening with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, or the National Book Award, in the United States. But it would be an interesting exercise.
