He is the winner of the Booker, the Booker of Bookers and the Best of Booker, but reputation counted for nothing when Sir Salman Rushdie was left off the shortlist for the 2008 Man Booker Prize yesterday.

Almost 30 years after Midnight’s Children saw off competition from novels by some of the literary world’s most fêted authors — no less than Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark — Sir Salman was eclipsed by two first-time novelists.

The Booker judges confounded expectations by choosing instead Aravind Adiga, 33, an Indian journalist who lives in Bombay, and Steve Toltz, 36, an Australian screenwriter and teacher from Sydney, among six authors whom they singled out for the £50,000 award.

The novice novelists face competition from four established writers: Sebastian Barry (also shortlisted in 2005), Amitav Ghosh, Linda Grant (longlisted in 2002 and winner of the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction) and Philip Hensher (a former Booker judge who was also longlisted in 2002).

Michael Portillo, the former Cabinet minister and chairman of the 2008 Man Booker judges, said: “These books are great page-turners . . . each of them an extraordinary example of imagination and narrative.”

He was particularly impressed by the debut novelists, whose work will “absolutely blow your cobwebs away”.

He called Adiga’s The White Tiger and its depiction of corruption a “fascinating book” and Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole and its story of a man who could not decide whether to love or murder his paranoid father as “wonderfully irreverent”.

Bookmakers, booksellers and publishers were divided over the likely winner. Ladbrokes installed Adiga as the 15-8 favourite with Toltz as the 7-1 outsider, while William Hill’s list was topped by Barry at 2-1, with Toltz its second joint favourite at 3-1. That Sir Salman was overlooked came as a surprise to the publishing world, particularly as Midnight’s Children was crowned the all-time “Best of Booker” in a public vote this summer.

The Enchantress of Florence, the author’s 16th-century epic set in Florence and India, was seen widely as a serious contender for Britain’s foremost fiction award.

Its admirers include John Sutherland, the academic, who declared that if it “doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it”.

The six candidates were whittled down from a longlist of thirteen, which included John Berger, who won the Booker 36 years ago.

The Booker is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Any full-length original English novel, written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published this year, is eligible.

The 2008 adjudicators — who include Alex Clark, editor of Granta, James Heneage, founder of Ottakar’s bookshops, and Hardeep Singh Kohli, the TV and radio broadcaster — took two hours to make their selection. But there was no heated debate, they insisted, only passionate debate.

The winner will be announced on October 14.

The shortlist

Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate) 8 -1
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber & Faber) 2-1 fav
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago) 3 -1
Aravind Adiga The White Tiger (Atlantic) 8 -1
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray) 6-1
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton) 3 -1

Odds: William Hill

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