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"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

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