Skip to main content

"The English Patient" Voted the Best-ever Man Booker Prize-winning Novel in Fifty Years



The Canadian novelist of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry, Michael Ondaatje  has won the special one-off Golden Man Booker Prize given to mark the 50th  anniversary of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award. Ondaatje’s The English Patient, a tale of love and strife during World War II was selected as the best work of fiction from the last fifty years of Booker Prize-winning novels. The 74-year-old author had beaten all the Man Booker Prize's previous 51 winners including the Indians  who were Salman Rushdie   for Midnight's Children (1981);  Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things (1997); Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (2006); and Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger (2008).
Image courtesy:https.tvtropes.org
The Man Booker Foundation had appointed a panel of five judges and asked each judge to read all the Booker Prize-winning works from a particular decade and choose his/her favourite one. This process produced the short list. The short-listed novels were V.S Naipal’s In a Free State, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, Michael Ondaatje’s The English patient, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. The Public was then invited to vote on the Man Booker website and choose the winner from this short list. At the awards ceremony Ondaatje said that he did not think that his was the best book on the list and opined that perhaps the film adaptation of his novel that garnered nine Oscars in 1997 had something to do with the result of the public online vote. In 1992, Ondaatje’s The English Patient had shared the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth's  Sacred Hunger.
The Booker Prize for Fiction which honours the best fiction written in the English language was first awarded in 1969.The 50th  anniversary of the prize is being celebrated globally this year with Man Booker author events being organized at international literary festivals across the world. In 2008, when the Booker Prize Foundation held a similar competition for its 40th anniversary, the public had voted for Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
Bhadra S

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Love and Betrayal: Kamala Das's “Letter from Radha”

       Image courtesy:nickyskye.blogspot.com Kamala Das’s short story “Letter from Radha” from the collection of stories Sandal Trees is a prose poem on the Radha--Krishna love. Unlike the  Bhakti  poets who celebrate the Radha--Krishna love of the Vrindavan days as an ideal love beyond the norms of traditional courtship and are silent about Krishna’s later desecration of that love, Das, in her story, prefers to interrogate Krishna’s change of heart after he left Vrindavan. She  demystifies the Radha--Krishna love and shows it to be what it really was—a love that ended abruptly in betrayal and abandonment, a love that left Radha broken-hearted. Das's story shows how cruel a man can be even to the woman he loves.    Krishna,when he becomes a king , man-like, deserts Radha, and she, woman-like, lives like one dead    pining for her beloved for in true love there is no such thing as “getting over it.” Even if a wound...
Post a Comment
Read more

She Pens to Protest

                                                                                                                                 I write                                                         Because   I cannot bite                                                         It’s the way Image courtesy: uk.pinterest.com             ...
2 comments
Read more

The Pup that Loved too Much

                      Love means never having to say that you're sorry, says Erich Segal in his  Love Story.  But this needn’t always be true. Love also means having to say that you are sorry. My little Blackie, I am sorry for letting you go, for not trying hard enough to get you back. Why did I let you go? Your only fault was that you loved me too much.        What can I say about a two month old puppy who walked into my life in the most unexpected manner? That she was black in colour with patches of white? That she loved carrying away and chewing my slippers, driving me mad in the process? That she loved lapping   up bread soaked in milk with her eyes closed? And above all, that she loved me so much that she couldn’t bear to let me out of her sight? I do not remember the date or month or even the year. It may have been...
2 comments
Read more