See the full list of Booker winners and tell us who you think should win

The public are to choose their favourite author in a one-off literary award to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction recognises the best novel of the year. Now “the Best of the Booker” will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded in 1969.

William Hill, the bookmaker, singled out Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, the fable of survival after a shipwreck (2002) yesterday, as well as classics such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which challenges ideas of history and nationhood (1981), and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), which inspired a film that won nine Oscars.

This is only the second time that a celebratory award has been created.

The first was in 1993 – the 25th anniversary – when Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight’s Children. Unlike then, this time the public will be able to vote.

In all, 41 novelists have won the prize over the years; in 1974 and 1992 there were two winners. In 1974 Nadine Gordimer won with The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton with Holiday. In 1992 Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient shared the top spot with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.

For the Best of the Booker, a panel of judges has been appointed to select a shortlist of six novels. They are Victoria Glendinning, the biographer, novelist and critic, as chairman, Mariella Frostrup, the broadcaster, and John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London.

Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting will begin via the Man Booker Prize website, www.themanbookerprize.com.

The overall winner of the Best of the Booker will be announced at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre in July.

Victoria Glendinning said: “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. All readers will enjoy this, and we look forward to hearing what the voters think.”

By the bookie

4-1 Yann Martel – The Life of Pi (2002)
5-1 Salman Rushdie
7-1 Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (1992)
8-1 Ben Okri – The Famished Road (1991); Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things (1997); Ian McEwan – Amsterdam (1998)
10-1 J. M. Coetzee – Disgrace (1999); Anne Enright – The Gathering (2007)

Source: William Hill

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