Rushdie named best Booker winner of all

THE novel Midnight's Children, first published 27 years ago by the provocative Indian-born writer Sir Salman Rushdie, sealed its place as an all-time British favourite yesterday.

The book, with its story centred on a character born at the dawn of Indian independence, was yesterday named the best Booker winner in the 40-year history of the prize.

Rushdie has long been a controversial figure. He was forced into hiding for nine years when the publication of The Satanic Versus brought a fatwa on his head in Iran in 1989.

There were renewed protests in Muslim countries when he was knighted this year.

But Midnight's Children, his second novel, has proved an enduring favourite since it won the Booker, the leading British literary prize, in 1981. It is considered his best work by some critics.

Midnight's Children won the first "Booker of Bookers" in 1993, from what was 25 years of the prize. Yesterday it won the "Best of the Booker", chosen by nearly 8,000 internet and text votes from a shortlist of six, to celebrate the Booker's 40th anniversary. Sir Salman's sons, Zafar and Milan, accepted the trophy in London on the author's behalf.

Sir Salman, 61, who is touring the United States to promote his latest novel, The Enchantress Of Florence, sent a message to the award ceremony in London.

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

It was appropriate, he added, that "my real children (are] accepting a prize for my imaginary children."

Midnight's Children, called an example of Sir Salman's magical realist style, follows Saleem Sinai, who is born on the stroke of midnight on the day of India's independence in 1947 and whose life loosely parallels the fortunes of his nascent country.

However, Jonathan Ruppin, the promotions manager at Foyles bookshop, called the prize an "artificial" award yesterday.

He questioned why the public only had six Booker novels to choose from, instead of picking from other favourites such as The God Of Small Things, The Remains Of The Day, Possession or Life Of Pi.

However, he said: "It's a book which always appears on polls of people's favourite books, so it's no surprise to see it win.

"He's not to everyone's taste but, from a bookseller's point of view, authors who get books into the news are always welcome."

The panel of judges selecting the shortlist included the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, the writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London.

Ms Glendinning said: "The readers have spoken – in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice."

The winner, chosen following a vote of 7,801 people, was announced as part of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre.

The Booker rewards the best novel each year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.

And the runners-up were ...

THE five other books shortlisted for the Best of the Booker, chosen from the 41 winners over the years, included:

• Disgrace by JM Coetzee: Rude awakening for PC lecturer in 1999 novel, bookies' second-favourite to win.

• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: Australian double-Booker winner's mid-19th century romance won in 1988.

• The Siege Of Krishnapur by JG Farrell: Comfortable colonial life disrupted by Indian Mutiny in 1973 winner.

• The Ghost Road by Pat Barker: Yorkshire-born 1995 winner, part of her trilogy set in the First World War.

• The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer's 1974 story of privileged South African farmer facing ruin.

Flashy, but awesome in scale and achievement

DAVID ROBINSON

WITH baseball, it's three strikes and you're out. With the Booker Prize, it's three wins and you get literary immortality.

There will be critics who – just as in 1981 when Midnight's Children first won the Booker and as in 1993 when it won the Booker of Bookers – persist in finding it no more than a flash piece of storytelling.

For the rest of us, though, Rushdie's novel gave us writing on a different scale. Here was a work free from the anaemic scale of so much British fiction, a novel of operatic scale and vibrant imagination.

So yes, it's showy, but look at what it shows: nothing less than the story of India itself through the mind of its protagonist, Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on 15 August, 1947, and magically imbued with the ability to see inside the minds of all the others whose birth, like his, coincided with that of their country.

Granted, it's not always an easy read. Anything with this amount of allusion, where reality and myth are so densely mixed, is never going to be.

But that doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable. For as it switches in and out of political satire, into digressions that seem to have no point and then turn out to be central, into descriptions of chutney, massacres, snake charmers, family feuds and political upheaval, it seems to mirror all the teeming chaos of lndian life.

In hindsight, Midnight's Children breathed new, post-colonial life into the British novel. It opened doors we hadn't even realised were doors in the first place.

It had structure, compassion, rage, satire and storytelling panache. It deserved to win then, and it fully deserves to win again now.